There are some notable anthropological articles starting, it seems, with Hallowell in the 1960s which re-examines the idea and concept of Animism. These articles against the modernist idea that animist beliefs and practices are a mythological concept, failed epistemology, or the outcome of a cognitive evolution.  Instead claiming that animism is a relational epistemology and its praxis provides an authoritative understanding of the world to its human participants via a relationship with  “other-than-human”, “dividual persons”, and “super persons”. This process “worlding by relationship” is more thoroughly explored by Latour and others in what is commonly known as Actor Network Theory. ANT is a set of constructivist methodologies which aims to describe the or a world through the relationships between the actors in it. It is commonly repeated that ANT as a conceptual framework is “challenging”, because of its insistence that anything can be an actor in a network/world and that all actors should be described using the same terms, (e.g. cell phones holds are equal participant in a social network as a person on facebook”). It appears to me this challenge has already been overcome in the subset of animism known as shamanism. “Inanimate” objects or concepts are persons through a process of material-semiosis, but the hierarchy of control “network shape” is maintained through the limited methods of communication between special types of persons “shamans”. This allows for agency of non-humans actors without flattening and diminishing the status of human actors.

 

I think this lays a framework to examine and describe modern social environments by establishing technological actors as persons.

The special case here for me is Narrow A.I. systems.

Algorithmic technologies recognized as persons have the ability to be both multinatural, possessing a human subjectivity which is dependent on its form and nature within a specific culture. But, also multicultural in that it’s form an nature can be different for each culture than recognizes it in some way.

An algorithm can be multiple persons and act with material consequences independently.

 

Actor Network Theory

Contemporary Applications of Actor Network Theory

We Have Never Been Modern

On actor-network theory: A few clarifications

Material Semiotics

Serious Science

Animism and non-human personhood.

Youth and the Posthuman: Personhood, Transcendence, and Siri

“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology

How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement

Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view.

      summary here

 

Altered States of Consciousness

Altered states of consciousness /
edited by Charles T. Tart.

Traveling Between the Worlds: Conversations with Contemporary Shamans

 

 

Technologically induced Trance States and altered consciousness as a way to communicate with non-human, other than human, or superhuman persons.

Next-Mind

How Dogs Dream — Notable Quotable
“In sum, any entity that stands as a locus of “aboutness” within a lineage of such loci potentially extending into the future can be said to be alive.”
Multinaturalism, all beings posses a human subjectivity – A vulture finds the smeel of carrion sweet, a data sorting algorithm finds data savory. This subjectivity allows for translation between species ( life) .  The act of  “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes” or “becoming” is sometimes literal and seen as dangerous in some cultures generating states like the were-jaguar.  Awareness is seen as an indicator of a being “having” a soul, the organs which allow this awareness are the embodied location of the soul. (bile) – through ingestion or encapsulation of these organs a self is able to increase their own consciousness. This is symbolic and literal (from an energy perspective).  Transspecies communication requires becoming to an extent – the example here is that the web of a spider is both spider and fly, as it fits the fly perfectly.  “There is no place in Runa society for dogs as animals”
“I should also note that the kinds of dogs that the Runa acquire from colonists do not belong, for the most part, to any recognizable breed. Throughout much of Ecuador, such dogs are disparagingly described as “runa” (as in un perro runa)-that is, as mutts. In Quichua, by contrast, runa means “person.” It is used as a sort of pronominal marker of the sub- ject position-for all selves see themselves as persons-and it is only hypostasized as ethnonym in objectifying prac- tices such as ethnography, racial discrimination, and iden- tity politics.28 This Quichua term for person, however, has come to be used in Spanish to refer to mongrel dogs.29 It would not be too far a stretch to suggest that runa, for many Ecuadorians, refers to those dogs that lack a kind of civi- lized status, those sin cultura. Certain kinds of dogs and a certain historical group of indigenous people, the Quichua- speaking “Runa”-according to a logic that is multicultural, not multinatural-have come to serve as markers along this imagined route from animality to humanity. 11″
“cosmological autism” as  having the soul removed and existing
dreams are a privileged mode of communication
“I indicated above, if people want dogs to understand them, they must give dogs hallucinogenic drugs. That is, the Runa must make their dogs into shamans so that they can traverse the ontological boundaries that separate them from hu- mans.”
The Runa are faced with the following challenge: For people to communicate with dogs, dogs must be treated as conscious human subjects; yet dogs must simultaneously be treated as objects lest they talk back. This, it appears, is why Ventura used a canine imperative to address Puntero obliquely.34 And this also seems to be part of the reason why Puntero’s snout was tied shut during the process. If dogs were to “talk back,” people would enter a canine subjectivity, and they would, therefore, lose their privileged status as humans. By tying dogs down, in effect, denying them their animal bodies, the Runa permit a human subjectivity to emerge. Canine imperatives, then, allow the Runa to safely address this partially individuated emerging human self about the partially deindividuated and temporarily submerged canine one
Google searching as a form of transpecies pidgin?
The human-canine transspecies pidgin, like motherese, is oriented toward beings whose linguistic capabilities are in question. Although people in Avila go through great efforts to make their dogs understand human speech, how they communicate with their dogs must also conform to the ex- igencies of those species that cannot normally understand human speech, with its heavily symbolic mode of reference
Animism Revisited — Notable Quotable
Hallowell’s alternative “other-than-human persons” escapes these biased options but still conserves the primary objectivist concern with class (human and other-than-human). I use “superpersons” (persons with extra powers) as a general reference and let the local composite meanings grow from the context. 
It is not everywhere that the individual is regarded as “a single entity,” “bounded and integrated, and set contrastingly against other such wholes and against a natural and social backgrounds  (Clifford Geertz,quoted in Strathern 1988:57).