ethnos,฀vol.฀71:1,฀2006 Knowledge of Persons, Knowledge of Things: Animism, Fetishism, and Objectivism as Strategies for Knowing (or not Knowing) the World Alf Hornborg Lund฀University,฀Sweden abstract Animistic or ‘relational’ ontologies encountered in non-Western (i.e. pre- modern) settings pose a challenge to Western (i.e. modern) knowledge production, as they violate fundamental assumptions of Cartesian science. Natural scientists who have tried seriously to incorporate subject-subject relations into their intellectual practice (e.g. Uexküll, Bateson) have inexorably been relegated to the margins. Sur- rounded by philosophers and sociologists of science (e.g. Latour) announcing the end of Cartesian objectivism, however, late modern or ‘post-modern’ anthropologists discussing animistic understandings of nature will be excused for taking them more seriously than their predecessors. It is incumbent on them to analytically sort out what epistemological options there are, and to ask why pre-modern, modern, and post-modern people will tend to deal with culture/nature or subject/object hybridity in such different ways. Animism, fetishism, and objectivism can be understood as alternative responses to universal semiotic anxieties about where or how to draw boundaries between persons and things. Irrespective of whether science will find a way of acknowledging the sentient observer, it is imperative that it continues to maintain an analytical distinction between the symbolic and the pre-symbolic (culture and nature), while recognizing their pervasive interfusion in the real world. keywords Animism, fetishism, objectivism, modernity, epistemology, semiotics T he topic of ‘animism’ continues to intrigue modern people. What, then, do we mean by ‘modern’? As a number of social theorists have suggested, the social condition and technological accomplishments of ‘modernity’ have been founded on a categorical distinction between Na- ture and Society. It is by drawing a boundary between the world of objects and the world of meanings that the ‘modern’ project has emerged. By, as it were, ‘distilling’ Nature into its material properties alone, uncontaminated