The Animal Anthropology of Linda Schele’s Spirits

For Linda

A wide range of current scholarship challenges the prioritization 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 field 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 field’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 affirmative ethnographic conjuring of former life forms such as Schele, engaged as beings and traces suspended in and constantly reconstituting webs of significance and forms of (non)life.

SPINNING LIFE

Life oozes. Life oozes off tongues and fingertips, sticking to screens that feed us. Life itself. We eat it up.¹

We anthropologists have long obsessed with the human as a form of life. In 1851 Robert Gordon Latham carved out a chasm between history and anthropology, those two means of studying “Man.” The inheritors of Herodotus were to study “Man’s Civil history” (4). The rest of us were charged with the rather impure science of “Man’s Natural history,” or, “the study of Man as an animal” (5). Latham’s anthropology was the branch of zoology that treated the specificities of Man the species. He put it this way: “Anthropology deals with Man as compared with the lower animals” (5).

Latham had much to offer the few, curious higher-animal specimens of the Victorian era who sought self-knowledge on pan-specific scale. But his transspecific comparative impulse, his considerations of Man vis-à-vis monkey, apparently discomforted readers in the age of the penny press: “Anthropology deals too much with such matters as these to be popular. Unless the subject be handled with excessive delicacy, there is something revolting to fastidious minds in the cool contemplation of the differentiæ of the Zoologist ‘Who shows a Newton as he shows an ape’” (6).²

But despite the pathology of our revolting fastidiousness—that is, our evolving empiricism—anthropology has not yet succumbed to selective pressures leading to extinction. We live on despite the best efforts of predatory politicians and university administrators wreaking environmental havoc on the habitats of the liberal arts and sciences. Specters of Scopes?

Through such trials of strength, anthropology’s life endures. As does its fascination with life, with Man as a form of life, and an animal form at that. In his oft-repeated definition of culture, Clifford Geertz pegged Man as an animal before declaring his unique entanglement in those confounding “webs of significance.” While, for this reader at least, the cadence of Geertz’s phrasing retains allure, his metaphor proves odd, even a bit clumsy: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs” (1973, 5).

Consider the trope for a moment. The sovereign signifier’s a venomous, predatory arachnid.³ Geertz’s Man is an arthropod.⁴ Well, that, or a mythic monster, a chimerical hybrid.

Are we spiders? Spider-Men? Spiders spin threads of silk from abdominal glands, composing webs that their arachnologist companions divide into different architectural types (e.g., Blackledge et al.). There are two-dimensional orb...