THE ANIMAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF LINDA SCHELE'S SPIRITS

Abstract

tion of life, or bios, as a central political and epistemic category. The trend in ethnography has been to challenge this prioritization from the inside by extending forms of representation previously reserved for human subjects to other living beings. While such efforts in the anthropology of life and multispecies ethnography shift the Weld toward a more open ontology and a more ambitious empiricism, they also risk substituting biocentrism for anthropocentrism, thus reifying “life” in the effort to undo it. Here I address this problem by integrating experimental ethnographic writing on the late artist and Mayanist Linda Schele with a sympathetic critique of contemporary cultural anthropologists’ efforts to extend the Weld’s subject or object of knowledge beyond the human. I explore animal art in the margins of Schele’s letters and narrate the conditions and consequences of my ethnographic encounter with Schele’s husband. Drawing on both “Western” and “Maya” cosmologies, I trace her rich engagements with other beings (including Maya hieroglyphs, animal spirit companions, ancient Maya scribes, and her scholarly collaborators). I follow as Schele walks edges that demarcate life and death, present and past, human and animal, writing and art, scholar and amateur, science and religion, and rationality and irrationality. The essay ultimately seeks to host and model an experimental and afWrmative ethnographic conjuring of former life forms such as Schele, engaged as beings and traces suspended in and constantly reconstituting webs of signiWcance and forms of (non)life. The AnimAl AnThropology of lindA Schele’S SpiriTS