Rethinking animism

The starting point for rethinking animism is a pivot made by Nurit Bird-David in "'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology" (Current Anthropology 40, S1, 1999, pp. S67-S91). Bird-David's move - which both Ingold and Harvey build on - is to strip animism of its Tylorian sense as primitive belief (the mistaken projection of souls onto inert matter) and reframe it as an epistemology: a mode of knowing through relation rather than through separation. Her fieldwork is with the Nayaka of South India. The Nayaka do not first perceive the forest as inert and then decide to believe it is alive; rather, relating is their primary cognitive and perceptual mode. Knowing something means entering into relation with it, not standing apart to observe it. Bird-David calls this "relational epistemology" and contrasts it with the Cartesian default of Western modernity, where knowledge is produced through objectification — the separation of a knowing subject from an inert object. This is the theoretical ground on which the "new animism" is built. 

Ingold takes this further in a specifically perceptual and phenomenological direction. His key essay is "Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought" (Ethnos 71, 1, 2006, pp. 9–20), but it should be read alongside the chapters on animism and skill in The Perception of the Environment (Routledge, 2000) and the essays in Being Alive (Routledge, 2011). Ingold's argument is that animism has been systematically misread as the imputation of life to otherwise inert things — which is, he notes, more characteristic of Western fantasies (finding life on other planets, speaking of "dead" matter) than of the indigenous peoples to whom the label has been applied. The people typically called animists do not project life onto the world; they perceive a world that is already alive and in continuous formation. He calls this the "animic ontology": beings do not move across a pre-given world but issue forth through a world-in-formation, along the lines of their relationships. Life, in this view, is not contained inside bodies and then expressed outward; it is distributed through what Ingold calls the "meshwork" — a field of trails, flows, and lines of growth and movement. This is explicitly anti-hylomorphic: against the dominant Western assumption that form is imposed on passive matter from outside (the sculptor on clay, the director on actors), Ingold proposes that form emerges from within the material process itself. The animic world is not made but grown.

Harvey's contribution is adjacent but distinct. Where Ingold is phenomenological, Harvey is ethical and relational. His book Animism: Respecting the Living World (Columbia University Press, 2005) builds on the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell's concept of "other-than-human persons," developed in "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View" (in S. Diamond, ed., Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, Columbia University Press, 1960). Hallowell's crucial move was to show that for the Ojibwa, personhood is not exclusive to humans: rocks, animals, weather phenomena can all be persons — beings with interiority, sociality, and the capacity to act and communicate. Harvey extends this into a general reformulation: animism, he argues, is best understood not as a set of beliefs about souls but as the recognition that "the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others." The emphasis falls on practice and ethics rather than cosmology: what matters is not what you believe about the inner life of a stone but how you behave toward it. Does your conduct acknowledge it as a participant in a shared world? Harvey edited The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (Acumen, 2013) which maps this field across multiple disciplines.

Together, Bird-David, Ingold, and Harvey constitute a rethinking of animism that is useful precisely because it shifts the question from belief to relation, from cosmology to perception and practice.