RECOVERING KINSHIP: THE NEW ANIMISM
Graham Harvey
Some words work really hard. This can be rewarding for both the words and their speakers, hearers, readers, users, and recipients. “Animism” (the word) does a lot of work because it carries a range of associations, some of which need to be teased out and others that must be strongly challenged. It is, in other words, deployed in strongly oppositional discourses. That’s often the way with critical terms—as it is with slogans. So here I offer a reflection on the still evolving use of “animism” as a debated critical term.
Animism (the phenomena so labelled by the term’s proponents and opponents) is not new. Animists (of different kinds) are found in many eras and places. Whether such identifications are correct, useful or respectful is at the heart of many disagreements about “old” and “new” approaches to animism. What is new in the “new animism” is an approach to phenomena and people. This approach takes seriously the world-making epistemologies and/or ontologies of the people who might be labelled “animists.” It entails considering whether labelling people as animists enables or disables attention to what is important to them and provocative of critical debate about matters of wider concern. Among those debates and concerns are questions about putative resonances between animism and some traditions and projects of ecological practice.
Of similar importance to worrying about the word “new” (and, of course, “old”, to which we’ll return) is recognition that for many people who are called animists by scholars or other interested parties, “animist” is not a self-designation. It is not a name many so-called animists use about themselves. When I asked Linda Hogan (Chickasaw scholar and author) to write about animism, she insisted, “For tribal peoples, our relationships and kinship with the alive world is simply called tradition” (2013: 19). No other word is needed. Hogan has written eloquently and at length about what I call animism, but she does not need my word in order to tell her stories or to intervene with her wisdom. She shows that tradition, or animism (my term), is the way things are, can be, or should be. It is the continuous practice of trying to live well among other beings— kin of many species—all deserving respect even in contexts of predation and consumption.
I am not alone in writing about animists and animism in “new” (to academia) ways. A wide-ranging conversation draws attention to a diversity of efforts to understand particular kinds of human engagement with the larger-than-human world and, particularly, with other-than-human persons, relations, or kin. The debate takes in epistemology—ways of knowing—and ontology—ways of being. It is frequently concerned with critical reflection about the knowledges and lifeways of Indigenous people. But animists can be found everywhere. Indeed, recently some people have found that the term helpfully encapsulates and encourages their core concerns and ambitions, and some of them (perhaps influenced by academic debates) even name themselves “new animists.” Among those concerns and ambitions is a desire to live well within multispecies communities or ecologies. Sometimes this propels people to contest threats to the well-being of other beings or ecologies, at local and/or planetary scales.
The academic “new animism” debate is also frequently concerned with critical reflection about the assumptions and ambitions of those Bruno Latour called “Moderns” (1993). This thread of the conversation is woven into the tapestry of scholarship that seeks to “make the familiar strange” or, more dramatically and urgently, to contest hegemonic epistemologies and ontologies. Put differently, “new animist” approaches fit with scholarly approaches that do not assume that “we” already know the truth about reality but might, and should, learn from “others.” They resonate with determined efforts to decolonize the academy along with the larger “one-world world” (Law 2015) which it often sustains.
“New” clearly implies a contrast with “old.” What can be labelled the “old animism” (but only after the emergence of a “new” one) is most often associated with Edward Tylor, the first professor of anthropology in Oxford, and the author of Primitive Religion (1871). Tylor took up the term “animism” to convey his idea that religion is definitively a “belief in souls” (or spirits or other metaphysical entities). Religion (and therefore all religions) was, for Tylor, at heart, the continuation of a primitive but understandable mistake in which people attribute intentionality and personality where these are unwarranted (at least by Moderns). There is, according to the sweep of Tylor’s work, a rationality generative of this mistake—it is an understandable and easy mistake to make. It provides an explanation for dreams of deceased relatives, or for improvements to life after a sacrifice or prayer is offered to some putative powerful being. Nonetheless, Tylor did not agree that such experiences and explanations correctly interpret reality, and, he clearly hoped, such interpretations would be replaced by better, more rational knowledge.
This “old animism” is not necessarily obsolete, and more will be said about it below. But it is the “new animism” that interests me. A key moment for many contributors to the new animism is their interest in a conversation between the US anthropologist Irving Hallowell and the Anishinaabe elder, Kiiwiich, in the early to mid-twentieth century (Hallowell 1960). Knowing that Anishinaabe grammar marks rocks (asiniig) as grammatically “animate” (by the use of the animate plural suffix -iig), Hallowell asked “are all the stones around us alive?” The elder’s somewhat enigmatic reply, “no, but some are,” has deservedly provoked further conversations. In short, the crucial lesson here is about asking the right question. For Kiiwiich, the point is not to distinguish categories (life or death, animacy or inanimacy, personhood or objecthood) but to improve relationships. His underlying cultural assumption or traditional ontology is that all existences are able to relate with others in diverse ways—and should relate respectfully (constructively and carefully). Hallowell’s use of the term “other-than-human persons” has been fruitful in enabling further consideration of the ways in which beings of diverse species co-construct communities and worlds. For Hallowell’s Anishinaabe hosts, such multi-species personhood and personal relations require recognition and enhancement of locally appropriate ways of relating that are respectful and life-enhancing. Thus, Hallowell (taught by his hosts) prefigured the key phenomena of interest in “new animism” as relationality, good living, and world-making.
In the later twentieth century, ethnologists’ engagement with the epistemologies and ontologies of many Indigenous people were aided by the retrieval of the term “animism.” It had been marginalized or rejected either because other ideas about the origins and definitions of religion had been proposed, or because of the colonialist and primitivist project to which (old) “animism” had contributed. An article by the Israeli anthropologist Nurit Bird-David (1999) marks the coalescence of “new animism” approaches as a focus of renewed discussion. Making use of the Hallowell-Kiiwiich conversation and of the work of other colleagues, Bird-David analyzed some of the value of the term “animism” in approaching epistemology and ontology, especially in relation to the Nayaka of India’s Nilgiri hills. Responses to that article by seven colleagues in the same journal issue propelled an increasingly rich debate which has continued in many other publications.
In later publications Bird-David has further enriched the discussion. For example, in her 2018 essay “Persons or Relatives?” she emphasized that however productive and provocative the term “person” has been, it can suggest something too systematic, categorical, or philosophical. It struggles to convey the more typical immediacy and intimacy that enliven the ways many animists speak of, to, and with their other-than-human kin or relations. While she is addressing concerns about the presentation of “tiny-scale” communities, kinship and relationality have become core themes in multi-disciplinary consideration of animist and wider Indigenous knowledges (see, e.g., Kimmerer 2013, and Van Horn, Kimmerer, and Hausdoerffer 2021). There are, for example, significant synergies between new animism and new materialism research and writing. Karen Barad’s terms “agential realism” and “intra-action,” and her insistence on the inseparability of supposedly discrete phenomena (including researchers and that which they research) have influenced a remarkable range of scholarly fields. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as the full range of ethnographic disciplines provide myriad further examples of emerging conversations. Importantly the synergies and/or transversal encounters embrace approaches and modes of attention—again, contesting the
Modernist project of separating scholarly “experts” from whatever they “observe.”
The colonial legacy of the old animism—often a slur accusing Indigenous people of primitivism and folly—has, perhaps, restrained a potentially more fruitful conversation between new animism and critical indigenous studies. Perhaps this is related to the adverse effects of problematic rhetorics about “religion” in inter-cultural contexts—even though, as a label for diverse locally appropriate inter-species conversations and collaborations, “animism” is not only about whatever passes for religion.
As a final thought: although it is vital to take ontologies and cosmopolitics seriously, scholarly discussion of animism can be overly serious and, as with other phenomena, miss the drama and humor of people’s relationships with(in) the larger-than-human community. Drama, humor, and vitally, sensuality have not been missed in more popular (and equally profound) elaborations of animism, many inspired by the work of David Abram (1997).
References
Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40: S67-91.
Bird-David, N. 2018. “Persons or Relatives? Animistic Scales of Practice and Imagination,” in Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey (eds.), Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality, pp. 25-34. London: Routledge.
Hallowell, A. Irving. 1960. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View,” in Stanley Diamond (ed.), Culture in History, pp. 18-49. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hogan, Linda. 2013. “We Call It Tradition,” in Graham Harvey (ed.), Handbook of Contemporary Animism, pp. 17-26. London: Routledge.
Kimmerer, Robin W. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed.
Law, John. 2015. “What’s Wrong with a One-World World?”, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 16.1: 126-29.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Van Horn, Gavin, Robin W. Kimmerer and John Hausdoerffer (eds.). 2021. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Libertyville: Center for Humans and Nature Press.