1/4/2023 0 Comments Spirit animal![]() ![]() When the pedigree of a practice is prized, we overplay claims to ancestral resemblances. Your dissenting patient assumed - as you did - that what you were up to closely resembled the practices of specific Native groups. And so we have handbooks on “how to connect with your animal spirit guide” alongside manuals for using kabbalah to “make your dreams come true” and I Ching for “business strategizing.” Is it wrong to be, er, Zen about this? Then certain New Age writers, who tend to assign a hazily homogenized worldview to the many hundreds of Indigenous North American groups, adopted the term as a Native catchall. (The particular Asante clan to which my father belonged had an animal spirit-being, the West African buffalo.) The prevalence of such spirit-beings was one reason Emile Durkheim thought - wrongly, in my view - that what he called totemism was the earliest form of religion. There are animal spirit-beings associated with descent groups all around the world, including in Oceanic, Asian and African cultures, and they embody various roles: guides, taboos, helpful familiars, powers to be appeased. When anthropologists, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, referred to “spirit animals” - as James Frazer did in “The Golden Bough” - they were as likely to be referring to practices in the South Pacific as in the Americas. She claimed that it was an example of “cultural appropriation.” Is she right? Name Withheld But I am a white male, and one patient questioned whether it was appropriate for me to do this exercise. ![]() The patients seemed to get a lot out of the session. We discussed the internal individual experience and the group experience. ![]() Afterward, we discussed the meanings of their animals, and patients drew pictures of them and put them on a totem pole. I led participants on a guided mindfulness journey to find their spirit animals. I work as an art therapist at a hospital, where I invited a group of patients to participate in an exercise based on the practices of several Indigenous American cultures. ![]()
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