Jamie Graham—Abram Quote: Ants as Spirits

 “I walked into my room chuckling to myself: the Balkan and his wife had gone to so much trouble to placate the household spirits with gifts, only to have their offerings stolen by little six-legged thieves. What a waste! But then a strange thought dawned on me: what if the ants were the very ‘household spirits’ to whom the offerings were being made?” (Abram, p. 12)

    In this section of The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram describes his hostess’s habit of setting out offerings for “household spirits.” He witnesses ants coming and taking the food she has put out. At first he thinks this is funny, but then he comes to the realization that indigenous cultures don’t anthropomorphize spirits like most Western tradition does. This offers insight in how oral cultures perceive the spiritual realm. Abram’s initial reaction of laughing is rooted in a Western, anthropomorphic tradition, which assumes that spirits must be unseen, abstract, and often human-like entities who operate on human logic. However, the realization that dawns on Abram that the ants just may be the “household spirits” shatters his initial assumption. It suggests that in an indigenous or traditional cosmology, the spiritual realm is not separated from the material world, but is interwoven with it.


    This understanding reveals a difference in world view: in traditional cosmologies, power, consciousness, and the sacred are distributed across the entire ecosystem, not limited to human forms. The ‘spirit’ is not necessarily a ghostly ancestor or a anthropomorphic god, but the very life force of a specific place, plant, animal, or in this case an insect. The ants, being physically and continuously present in the home, interacting with the people’s food and boundaries become a representation of the unseen forces of fate acting upon the household. In this world view, the lines between the physical, the animal, and the sacred are continuously blurred. 


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