As an animist, I experience all that surrounds me, especially the more-than-human world, as full of life and agency. Grasshoppers and elk and wind are not “less than” – just “different than.” Humans do not reside at the pinnacle of some blooming, bursting pyramid. Instead, I am simply one amongst many, awash in the community of life that eats and is eaten, that consumes and also shares, deeply enmeshed in a host of relationships that form an enlivening web of connection.
Animism is the longest-lived human belief system, and arises directly from human experience. I didn’t need a wise woman or shaman to explain its intricacies to me. Instead, my animistic beliefs arose naturally from my own childhood, making sense of the world around me. Animism isn’t about constructing a complex hierarchy or putting faith in something mysterious or beyond comprehension. Rather, it is a cosmology that emerges from what is seen, felt, and touched, no interlocutor necessary.
From the perspective of the full sweep of human evolution, animism has been displaced only recently by the monotheistic and patriarchal triad of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Despite animism’s proven history as a stable and often generative way of being over thousands of years of human culture, our shared animistic past is so buried and forgotten that most folks have no knowledge of its practice, or dismiss it out of hand as primitive and ignorant.
Even though a full animistic philosophy is not often understood or even recognized, animistic remnants still populate our discourse. For example, Magnus Nilsson, the renowned chef of Fäviken, offers a description of ingredients straight out of animistic catechism: “Exceptional items of food are in some way bursting with something you can feel as a cook, in a way that whoever you are cooking for is definitely going to feel when they eat it, even though they might not be able to say why. For me personally, exceptional produce almost sings. It is hard to explain, but I can feel this quality much more than I can intellectually understand it.”[i] Because our vocabulary and cosmological assumptions preclude the value of all life forms broadly understood, we've lost the ability to recognize or name the animated vivacity at play all around us. Fortunately, though, we can still be touched by the grandeur of the Tetons, the tenderness of a cow licking her newborn calf, or the mysterious workings of an ant colony.
The failure to experience and value the creatures, weather, and forces that surround us as animated has led to great tragedies: the elevation of the human species over others, the colonizer creation of the “chain of being,” the destructive notion that competition is more productive than cooperation, and the belief that exploitation should be pursued over nurture and care.
As the definition of life has narrowed, so, too, has human experience. In building walls to defend the supremacy of humanity, the Dominion Dudes (white guys who, over centuries, built the church, tamed the wilderness, and conquered the seas) severed connections to and communion with forces as essential as wind and rain and water. As inheritors and purveyors of that belief system, Americans now grapple with isolation, environmental destruction, alienation, extinction, and planetary ruin, produced and justified by a failed cosmology. Not a stellar track record.
My continuous struggle in this Living into Extinction series is to locate legitimate hope, to enumerate concrete steps towards a generative future. Fortunately, such a search for optimism, at least with reference to animism, is not a herculean task. Many species are extinct; we can’t bring them back. A restoration of stable and livable climate patterns and sustainable temperatures might not be possible. Systems of consumption dominate the planet. Those are big issues that require collective changes, worthy of support but unlikely to change dramatically in the near future.
But in this moment, we can put ourselves into relationship with life writ large. Right now, without altering culture or shifting adherence to global capitalism, we can engage with all that is around us. At the Patch, even with limited species and an increasingly inhospitable climate, I can see, I can be with, I can celebrate all that sings, twitters, scurries, blows, and even just sits there. I return to a space of connection and sustenance, where I am one among many. I reside in the place where humans evolved, and I am home.
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[i] Magnus Nilsson, Fäviken: 4015 Days, Beginning to End, Phaidon, 2020, p. 70.
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