Beyond human kinship

This paper challenges interpretations of Mesolithic and Neolithic imagery (‘rock art’ and ‘portable art’) of the Baltic Sea, which by default rest upon hylomorphism, iconology and transcendentalism – frameworks which reproduce a Western perspective of reality to be universal both in time and space. By drawing on theoretical perspectives of new animism and ethnographic insights from northwestern Siberia in combination with the method of ‘iconography of immanentism’, the paper reconceptualises the Mesolithic and Neolithic imageries. It suggests that these imageries are direct correspondences between humans and animals, which are practices within animistic ontologies focusing on different superior animal beings within various regions of the Baltic Sea – superior animal beings potentially caught up in totemic kinship relations, within the evolving, changing and non-static animisms existing around the Baltic Sea from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic.