Dr Eliran Arazi

Eliran’s academic trajectory has been guided by an interest in how relationships between people are shaped by their relationships with nonhuman beings, such as animals, gods, and spirits. After completing an M.A. on the interrelations between notions of honour and shame and ritual purity in ancient Judea, Eliran shifted to social anthropology, earning a PhD (2024) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Andoque people of the Colombian Amazon, his dissertation examined the Andoque’s concepts and dynamics of power, particularly at the intersection of human-nonhuman relations and their interactions with non-Indigenous agents, including settlers, the state, and environmental organizations. 

As a visiting researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology, Eliran is investigating how ontological questions concerning perceived distributed agency across species intersect with notions of language, kinship, and ethics. Alongside this work, he explores how autoethnography and literary writing lend themselves to examining Amazonian perceptions of nonhuman agency and the immanence of language in reality, and is developing a framework for exploring the figure of the devil across ontologies of evil.