Abstract
The idea that a human being is composed of a material body and substances that are evident and dynamic in waking daily life, and one or more other nonbodily essences that may be material or less tangible and that are evident through the body’s daily actions, personality, success, dreaming at night, illness, healing, death, and/or other phenomena, is universal across cultures. The soul in contemporary Judeo-Christian thought is one such posited essence, but hardly applicable to most other cultural groups, given its specific suite of associations with vitality, life after death, and original sin; its unitary and ethereal natures; its origin in God; and other culture-specific characteristics.
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Acknowledgements
I, Brianna Rafidi, thank the Barrett Honors College of Arizona State University for supporting this research through their Honors Project Fund Award. We, Christopher Carr and Brianna Rafidi, are grateful to the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in Arizona State University for grant funding for this project through their Undergraduate Summer Research Enrichment Program Award for 2014, and to the Barrett Honors College for funding through their Thesis Advisor Travel Expense Program for 2016.
Notes
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1.
Some of the data, ideas, and writings in this chapter have been presented more summarily in portions of Carr et al. (2018).
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2.
Here, James applies the logic of the native Indonesian notion of seelstoff, a vital force that is conceived of as impersonal or personal depending on whether it is inside or outside the human body and whether it resides in an animal, a plant, or an object of greater or lesser importance. In so doing, James struck a middle ground between Hewitt’s (1902:38; 1910:147), Fletcher’s (1897:5), Jones’s (1905:190), Boas’s (1910:366), and Benedict’s (1938:628–630) views of an animating force that is impersonal and Radin’s (1914:344, 349–350) view of powerful essences that are “definite spirits”, that is, personal, although “not necessarily definite in shape.” For a literature review favoring the latter, see Tooker (1979).
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3.
James’s developmental sequence, which derives the idea of a free soul from the notion of a body soul, is a reiteration of Wundt’s (1910:24, 70, 78, 79, 85, 114, 121, 122, 125, 127, 170 256).
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4.
The seven South American Indian tribes included in Nieuwenhuis’s (1924) comparison are the Uitoto, Carib, Taulipang, Toba, Chorotis, Canelos, and Jibaro.
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5.
Nieuwenhuis considers only the life soul/body soul in his study, not the free soul, which is commonly thought to wander when one sleeps and dreams.
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6.
To argue the development of the idea of soul dualism prior to the idea of a unitary soul in North America, Hultkrantz relied foremost on phenomenological circumstances and psychological processes. He also pointed to the wider geographic distribution of concepts of soul dualism than of a unitary soul in aboriginal North America (Wissler’s age-area method), the greater number of tribes (about twice as many) with ideas of two souls rather than one, and the association of single-soul concepts with “higher” (supposedly later) cultures and dual-soul concepts with more “primitive” (supposedly earlier) cultures (Hultkrantz 1953:111–112). These methods attempt to track time and history with geographic distributions, relative frequencies, and cultural complexity; however, time need not correlate with the latter three, for many reasons now well known.
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7.
For some other clear examples of Hultkrantz’s reworking of or reinterpreting data to fit the notion of soul dualism, see Hultkrantz (1953:90, 105–106, 113).
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8.
For cases M001 through M060 and cases B001 through B089, which refer to the Delaware, Iroquois, Ojibwa, and Winnebago tribes, and occasionally others, textual information on the first five, simpler variables was paraphrased or reduced to a few key words from the original source (e.g., ‘one soul’, ‘soul resides in the bones’) rather than copied directly at length from it.
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9.
For example, in Table 17.7, concerned with the location of souls within the body, one finds that ten variants (body locations) were observed in the searched literature (column 1). The body location, head/skull/brain, was observed in literatures for 5 named tribes—the second most frequently observed variant of the ten (column 2). The 5 tribes are the Iroquois, Menomini, Micmac, Naskapi, and Ojibwa (column 3). The head/skull/brain was also observed in a textual passage about an unnamed tribe in the Quebec area (column 4). The Iroquois said souls are located in 3 different body positions (column 3). The head/neck/brain is the second most common body position reported by the Iroquois, having been observed 3 times (3 hits), compared to 7 times (7 hits) for the bones/skeleton/marrow (column 3). Considering all tribes, named (column 3) and unnamed (column 4) in the literature, the body location, head/skull/brain, was observed commonly: 10 hits of the total of 51 hits for all ten variants, or 19.6% of all hits for all variants (column 5). Only the heart and the bones/skeleton/marrow were observed more frequently, and only marginally so, each with 11 hits or 21.6% of all hits for all variants (column 5).
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10.
For example, consider the variable, ‘locations of souls in the body’ (Table 17.8). Each region reports at least one variant for this variable, such as head, heart, and bones. However, tribes that located a soul in bones are exclusive to the Northeast region; the idea of a soul in bones is not mentioned by tribes of the Southeast or Plains regions in the literature we searched.
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11.
For example, again consider the variable, ‘locations of souls in the body’. The heart and the bones were equally popularly thought by Woodland-Plains tribes to be the bodily location of a soul, both anatomical parts having 11 hits (Table 17.8). However, the idea of the heart as a location of a soul was found among tribes in two regions and 5 subregions, whereas the notion that bones are a location of a soul was found among tribes in only one region and 2 subregions.
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12.
The minimum degree of underestimation of the number of tribes that had a variable state can be assessed from the number of tribes for which the most common variable state is reported compared to 100% reporting. The most frequently reported variable state is ‘journeys’. It is reported for 38 of 43 tribes. The minimum degree of underestimation of any variable state in our data is thus (43–38)/43, or 12%. An estimate of the minimum actual number of tribes that had a given variable state would be the number of the tribes in our sample with that variable state multiplied by 43/38, or 1.13. Thus, for example, if only 4 Woodland and Plains tribes in our corpus were found to have a given variable state, the actual number of tribes in our corpus that probably had the variable state would be 4 × 43/38 = 4.5, that is, 1.1% of all tribes rather than 0.09%. These differences are insignificant relative to sampling error.
A more likely degree of underestimation of a variable state can be assessed considering that only 18 of 43 tribes in our corpus have substantially more data than others. A likely degree of underestimation of any variable state in our data is thus (43–18)/43, or 58%. An estimate of the likely actual number of tribes that had a given variable state would be the number of tribes in our sample with that variable state multiplied by 43/18, or 2.3. Thus, taking again our example of 4 Woodland and Plains tribes in our data having a given variable state reported, the actual number of tribes in our corpus that probably had the variable state would be 4 × 43/18 = 9.6 tribes, that is, 22% of all tribes in our sample rather than 9.3%. This is a very significant number, whereas “4 tribes” sounds small. Similarly, if only 8 tribes in our corpus were found to have had a given variable state, the actual number of tribes in our corpus that likely had the variable state would be 8 × 43/18 = 19 tribes, or almost half the tribes. Thus, in our analyses, when we found a pattern in the frequency or spatial distribution of a variable state, we considered the pattern significant even when the number of tribes with the variable state is small. For example, a recurrent view, told by 3 Plains tribes is that an individual has four souls. This pattern of only 3 tribes seems weak on face value, but given the unsaturated nature of our data, a more likely estimate of the actual number of tribes that had that view is about 3 × 43/18 = 7 tribes, or about 16% of all tribes in our sample, instead of 7%. Indeed, Hultkrantz (1953:116–123), drawing from a larger Plains literature, found that a four-souls concept was present among 5 Plains tribes.
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13.
Compared to Table 17.5, these counts include one additional tribe and one additional hit for the Cherokee, in consideration of references not included in our systematic survey and discovered subsequently (Cozzo 2007; Fogelson 1982; 2015; Witthoft 1983).
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14.
The Cherokee four-soul system is described in literature that was discovered after the completion of this survey (Cozzo 2007; Fogelson 1982; 2015; Witthoft 1983) and is not listed in Tables 17.5, 17.6).
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15.
Compared to Table 17.7, the counts include one additional tribe and one additional hit for each of the heart, the head/skull/brain, and the bones/skeleton/marrow for the Cherokee, in consideration of references not included in our systematic survey and discovered subsequently (Cozzo 2007; Fogelson 1982; 2015; Witthoft 1983).
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16.
Compared to Table 17.7, the counts include one additional tribe and one additional hit for the bones/skeleton/marrow for the Cherokee, in consideration of references not included in our systematic survey and discovered subsequently (Cozzo 2007; Fogelson 1982; 2015; Witthoft 1983).
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17.
Compared to Table 17.8, the count for the Southeast includes one additional tribe, the Cherokee, in consideration of references not included in our systematic survey and discovered subsequently (Cozzo 2007; Fogelson 1982; 2015; Witthoft 1983).
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18.
Compared to Table 17.9, these counts include one additional tribe and one additional hit for the Cherokee, in consideration of references not included in our systematic survey and discovered subsequently (Cozzo 2007; Fogelson 1982; 2015; Witthoft 1983).
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19.
Compared to Table 17.10, the count for the Southeast includes one additional tribe, the Cherokee, in consideration of references not included in our systematic survey and discovered subsequently (Cozzo 2007; Fogelson 1982; 2015; Witthoft 1983).
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20.
The Cherokee are included in this list of 2 tribes but not in Table 17.13, in consideration of references not included in our systematic survey and discovered subsequently (Cozzo 2007; Fogelson 1982; 2015; Witthoft 1983).
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Rafidi, B.J., Carr, C., Kupsch, M.F. (2021). The Human Being as Multiple Soul-Like Essences in the Ontologies of Postcontact Eastern Woodland and Plains Indians: Inventory, Frequencies, and Geographic Distributions of Concepts in Oral Narratives. In: Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44917-9_17
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