Wednesday, June 9, 2010

"What's your spirit animal?"

... a popular question I've been posed several times in the last five months, and I still don't have a definite answer. I'm not writing out of frustration though because I'm still wondering, 'what is a spirit animal?'

Are our spirit animals somehow one with us? Like, in times of trouble will the owl or the hawk come swooping in to assist its 'spirit human'? Or is the connection like he or she was a raccoon in another life? Or is a spirit animal more of a teacher/mentor/patron saint? I've also wondered, do we look like specific animals and that's how our spirits are discerned? (That would be pretty silly to interpret the 'spiritual' purely from the physical, but... I digress.)

At first, this seems like a New-Age, peace-loving jab at personality psychology which offers a creative way to imagine our traits as the characteristics of another being on earth. Naming a spirit animal also gives us an opportunity to fabricate some kind of connection with a fuzzy/slimy/majestic friend, thus giving us some sort of animal-sibling that we mysteriously embody. Perhaps we long to do this because we lack connection to nature in our daily lives; we symbolically turn ourselves into animals in order to re-enter the natural world. What's strange about the "natural world" we create is that it knows no ecological boundaries; when we select a spirit animal we can chose from the entire animal kingdom--bunnies, wildebeest, iguanas, stingrays--you get the picture. We can even chose animals we have no first-hand experience with! I'm guilty of this. I recently suggested that my friend might be a zebra, but what the hell do I know about zebras?! The closest I've been to one was at the Como Zoo in St Paul, MN last summer. So no, I don't understand zebra psychology at all, but I also don't mean to diminish the whimsical, and Noah's Ark-ish quality of Spirit Animal Science.

Actually, I love the image of walking into my workplace in the morning only to find: an ocelot, a ferret, a beaver, a beluga whale, a bison, and an armadillo toiling away at their respective desks. This notion is very much like Isaiah 11: 6-9--"The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea." I've always loved this verse for its utopic and peace-drenched portrayal of a place and a time that is so difficult to imagine right now.

Maybe we use animals to represent our spirits because we believe they are more noble and pure than humans; HOWEVER, briefly allow me to recall the earliest anthropological work which referred to indigenous peoples as 'exotic others' who purely exemplified human desires and impulses. Indigenous communities were seen as laboratories in which to study the basics of human psychology and sociology unsullied, as it were, but the industrialized West. Yes, animals are animals. Humans are humans. But I still cringe to think of the way we anthropomorphize wild creatures by assigning specific virtues to them and simultaneously elevate them as noble not-humans, and then claim the rights to those creatures as spirit animals.

I also want to recognize that naming spirit animals can be a part of friendship/relationship formation; people help each other discern their spirit animals and this indicates how well they know each other. A group of my friends recently chose spirit animals for each other and it has given them a whole new conversation to continue as they live and work together. Again, this is a fun and whimsical activity and no one means any harm by it, but I think it's important to take a very close look at the implications of this fad.

I have no concrete idea about who, or which community, was the first to talk about spirit animals, but I'm willing to bet it was not the small liberal arts college I attend. So let's imagine, just for a paragraph, that spirit animals are a very sacred idea/practice for a group of people with a very particular history and a very sovereign culture. Here we are, taking this belief out of context and stretching/morphing it to fit our personal needs. I cannot condemn too harshly though (Afterall, this is the age of mash-ups, rampant borrowing, and BLOGGING for heaven's sake!), but it seems to me that this sort of plagiarism and contortion of other peoples' cultural beliefs is definitely disrespectful and even violent.

So now I've said my piece. I don't mean to ruin anyone's fun, but I also think it is important to be aware of the roots of notions like spirit animals and the complicated layers of a, seemingly, simple game.

Until next time,
The Rookie Anthropologist

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