Animism And The Question Of Life

The central purpose of this book is to help change the terms of the debate on animism, a classic theme in anthropology. It combines some of the finest ethnographic material currently available (including firsthand research on the Chachi of Ecuador) with an unusually broad geographic scope (the Americas, Asia, and Africa). Edward B. Tylor originally defined animism as the first phase in the development of religion. The heyday of cultural evolutionism may be over, but his basic conception is commonly assumed to remain valid in at least one respect: there is still a broad consensus that everything is alive within animism, or at least that more things are alive than a modern scientific observer would allow for (e.g., clouds, rivers, mountains) It is considered self-evident that animism is based on a kind of exaggeration: its adherents are presumed to impute life to this, that and the other in a remarkably generous manner. Against the prevailing consensus, this book argues that if animism has one outstanding feature, it is its peculiar restrictiveness. Animistic notions of life are astonishingly uniform across the globe, insofar as they are restricted rather than exaggerated. In the modern Western cosmology, life overlaps with the animate. Within animism, however, life is always conditional, and therefore tends to be limited to one’s kin, one’s pets and perhaps the plants in one’s garden. Thus it emerges that "our" modern biological concept of life is stranger than generally thought.

Animism refers to ontologies or worldviews which assign agency and personhood to human and non-human beings alike. Recent years have seen a revival of this concept in anthropology, where it is now discussed as an alternative to modern-Western naturalistic notions of human-environment relations. Based on original fieldwork, this book presents a number of case studies of animism from insular and peninsular Southeast Asia and offers a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon – its diversity and underlying commonalities and its resilience in the face of powerful forces of change. Critically engaging with the current standard notion of animism, based on hunter-gatherer and horticulturalist societies in other regions, it examines the roles of life forces, souls and spirits in local cosmologies and indigenous religion. It proposes an expansion of the concept to societies featuring mixed farming, sacrifice and hierarchy and explores the question of how non-human agents are created through acts of attention and communication, touching upon the relationship between animist ontologies, world religion, and the state. Shedding new light on Southeast Asian religious ethnographic research, the book is a significant contribution to anthropological theory and the revitalization of the concept of animism in the humanities and social sciences.

This book engages with the classic philosophical question of mind and matter, seeking to show its altered meaning and acuteness in the era of the Anthropocene. Arguing that matter, and, more broadly, the natural world, has been misconceived since Descartes, it explores the devastating impact that this has had in practice in the West. As such, alternatives are needed, whether philosophical ones such as those offered by figures such as Whitehead and Nagel, or posthumanist ones such as those developed by Barad and Latour. Drawing on recent anthropological work ignored by philosophers and sociologists alike, the author considers a radical alternative cosmology: animism understood as panpsychism in practice. This understanding of mind and matter, of culture and nature, is then turned against present-day posthumanist critiques of what the Anthropocene amounts to, showing them up as philosophically misguided, politically mute, and ethically wanting. A ground-breaking reconceptualization of the natural world and our treatment of it, Cosmologies of the Anthropocene will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory, philosophy and anthropology with interests in our understanding of and relationship with nature.

The current crisis in thinking the “human” raises questions not only about who or what may come after the human, but also about what happened before. What dark secrets lie in our ancestral past that may be stopping us from becoming human “otherwise”?

Mainstream philosophy of religion has persistently failed to engage seriously or critically with animist beliefs and practices. The field that is now called "philosophy of religion" could quite easily be renamed "philosophy of theism" with few lecturers on the subject having to change their lecture notes. It is the aim of this volume to rectify that failure and to present animism as a live option among the plethora of religious worldviews. The volume addresses four major questions: 1. What is this thing called "animism"? 2. Are there any arguments for or against animist belief and practice? 3. What is the relationship between animism, naturalism, and the sciences? And 4. Should we take animism seriously? Animism and Philosophy of Religion is intended to be the first authoritative scholarly volume on the issue of animism and its place in the philosophy of religion. Ambitiously, it aims to act as the cornerstone volume for future work on the subject and as a key text for courses engaging with the subject.

In this new book Graham Harvey applies this new use of the term 'animism' applies to the religious worldviews of communities and cultures such as Ojibwe, Maori, Aboriginal Australian and eco-Pagan to introduce the diversity of ways of being animist.

How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.

Engages with the social cosmos of the Bible, in which all creatures, even 'inanimate' ones, are alive and able to interact.