A. Irving Hallowell’s research on the Ojibwe animism

Abstract

Alfred Irving Hallowell (1892–1974), a seasoned researcher of the Ojibwe culture, is known today primarily as a precursor of the anthropological theory of the “new animism”. A student of Franz Boas and a friend of Edward Sapir, he was not only a prominent figure of the culture and personality school, but also proved to be one of the most interesting psychological anthropologists of the 20th century. His works on the Ojibwe indigenous taxonomy prefigured the achievements of ethnoscience, and those on the evolution ofhuman behaviour adumbrated the development of sociobiology. Conducted in the 1930s, Hallowell’s fieldwork among the Berens River Ojibwe resulted in numerous academicpapers, one of which – the 1960 Ojibwa Ontology, Behaviour, and World View – years later became particularly influential in anthropological research on animism. This article presents Hallowell’s intellectual biography and discusses his research on the Ojibwe culture along with the concepts he used or developed, concepts that for many researchers became the key to unlocking new conceptualizations of the problem of animism.