![]() ![]() ![]() The participants have had dreams that have given them: inspiration, ideas, visions, messages, and advice for their creative work. The data were analyzed using Giorgi’s method of descriptive phenomenological psychological inquiry. I interviewed three professional creative artists about how they link their dreams to their creative work and/or experience creativity in their dreams. The experienced links between dreams and creativity in the work of professional creative artists needs additional research. The value of weaving between dreaming and waking realities creatively is important, but under-recognized by mainstream society. As part of my analysis I also examine the impact of Christianity on human-animal relations by exploring several incidents involving Christians and their tikedimɔmɔnte. In order to do this, I provide an in-depth, “thick description” (Geertz 1973) ethnography that explores how people perceive and relate to animals through hunting, domestication, attitudes to eating meat, animal commodification, reincarnation, shapeshifting and totemism. I demonstrate how these theoretical ideas work with reference to human-animal relations primarily amongst the Bebelibe in the Commune of Cobly. An engagement in the world between different entities in an ontonic and thus nonrepresentational sense necessitates my introducing further notions including shared “ontonity” (instead of shared humanity) and “ontonhood” (rather than personhood). Ontons, however, cannot be divided into representations (signifiers) and represented (signified) as signs can. Ontons are experiential, agentive and relational entities that are the result of presencing processes. As part of these theoretical frameworks, I examine the “onton”, as introduced by Johannes Merz (2017b). Presencing builds on semiotics by explaining how people make meaning present through their engagement in and with the world around them, whilst ontological penumbras are the shadowy spaces of limbo that affect our whole being and that people need to negotiate as part of making sense of their engagement with the world. I then explore the theoretical ideas I use for my analysis, which include “presencing” and the “ontological penumbra” (J. I start with an historical review of totemism, the debates it generated and how these contributed to the recent ontological turn in anthropology. In this thesis I explore human-animal relations amongst the Bebelibe of the Commune of Cobly, in the northwest of the Republic of Benin, West Africa, with a focus on how they relate to their tikedimɔmɔnte (true totem(s), literally “interdict(s)-true”).
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