Ojibwe Ontology and the Roots of the New Animism

Fieldwork Context and History

From 1930 to 1940, A. Irving Hallowell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a series of intensive summer fieldwork expeditions to the east side of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada.^[1] His primary focus was the Ojibwe (Saulteaux) community at Berens River.

Hallowell's research was made possible through his close collaboration with William Berens, the treaty chief of the Berens River community from 1917 to 1947.^[2] Chief Berens acted not merely as an informant, but as an essential guide and intellectual collaborator, enabling Hallowell to travel up the river to interact with more isolated Ojibwe groups and deeply understand their cultural paradigms.

Key Theoretical Contributions

The Concept of "Other-Than-Human Persons"

Hallowell's most enduring legacy is his coinage of the term "other-than-human persons," which he introduced in his seminal 1960 essay, Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.^[4]

Before Hallowell, Western anthropologists typically evaluated indigenous religions through the lens of Western supernaturalism. Hallowell realized that for the Ojibwe, the concept of a "person" was not synonymous with "human." Personhood was a broader category defined by sentience, agency, emotional capacity, and the ability to communicate. Therefore, a human is a person, but spiritual beings, animals, the wind, or thunder can also be persons.^[3:1]

This insight forced anthropologists to rethink "animism." The Ojibwe were not arbitrarily "personifying" inanimate objects (which implies a contrived projection of human traits onto dead matter); rather, they recognized the inherent relational personhood of the natural and spiritual world from the start.

Ojibwe Ontology and the "New Animism"

By seriously engaging with how the Ojibwe experienced their world, Hallowell introduced the concept of ontology into cultural anthropology.^[3:2] His work demonstrated that the Ojibwe did not merely have different "beliefs" about the world, but inhabited a different lived reality—an ontological framework where social interactions fundamentally included non-human entities. This specific framing makes Hallowell the widely acknowledged forefather of the contemporary "new animism" movement.

Temporal and Spatial Orientation

Hallowell also made significant observations regarding how the Berens River Ojibwe conceptualized time and space. He noted that they did not use abstract, homogeneous measurements (like clock time). Instead, temporal orientation was tied directly to concrete environmental events.

For example, when referring to the time of day just before the sun fully emerges over the horizon, the Ojibwe used the phrase anaamaatig e-bi-agoojing giizis, which translates to "beneath trees when hangs the sun."^[5] Hallowell identified this reliance on concrete, observable phenomena as the fundamental pattern of Native temporal orientation, contrasting sharply with Western abstractions.

Major Publications on the Ojibwe

Hallowell’s extensive writings on the Ojibwe were scattered across various journals over four decades, but some of the most critical works include:

• Culture and Experience (1955): A landmark collection of his essays detailing the psychological aspects of Ojibwe culture, including his studies on spatial and temporal orientation.

• "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View" (1960): Published in Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, this is the defining text where he introduced the "other-than-human person" concept.^[4:1]

• Contributions to Ojibwe Studies: Essays, 1934-1972 (2010): A posthumous, comprehensive volume gathering twenty-eight of his essays focusing specifically on the Berens River Ojibwe, showcasing his evolving thought and deep ethnographic rigor.^[1:1]

Backlinks

• Animism — Hallowell's concept of "other-than-human persons" is the foundational insight of the New Animism movement. His fieldwork among the Ojibwe demonstrated that animism is not a primitive projection of human traits onto dead matter, but a recognition of the inherent relational personhood of the natural and spiritual world — a paradigm that directly informs the Animism note's core framework.

References