Animist relations and relational ontologies in archaeological sites

Abstract

The text presents the result of a dialogue between the authors that focuses on topics such as Hybridism, Relational Animism, and Archaeological Sites. The authors, in both essayistic and committed ways, experiment with a programmatic and iconic proposal, formulated in the context of postmodern and postcolonial thoughts, of “taking seriously” multidimensional ontologies of production of knowledge. The assumptions of modern Cartesian science, with its organizations of referenced, objectivist, and limited nature, resist the animistic understandings or relational ontologies found in pre-modern or non-Western societies. Experiencing and taking the proposal seriously and diluting the limits between object and subject or between people and animals, the authors show a world where hybrid actors live together in a scenario organized by the tendency of all agents to accumulate. The authors present hybrid phenomena of political and patrimonial scope, in the example of archaeological sites as discarded heaps, which lack definitions and a displacement of agency relations.