The Handbook of Contemporary Animism

Graham Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317544494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Handbook of Contemporary Animism brings together an international team of scholars to examine the full range of animist worldviews and practices. The volume opens with an examination of recent approaches to animism. This is followed by evaluations of ethnographic, cognitive, literary, performative, and material culture approaches, as well as advances in activist and indigenous thinking about animism. This handbook will be invaluable to students and scholars of Religion, Sociology and Anthropology.

I

Different animisms

INTRODUCTION

Stars, ancestors, antelopes and ducks frame Linda Hogan’s opening essay. She places the myriad relations of our planetary life in the widest context of a life-giving universe and in the smallest context of intimate kinship. Hogan, a Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist and scholar, draws on her rich understanding of varied North American indigenous knowledges and life-ways to present a cautious welcome to renewed academic interest in animism. She recognizes attempts to engage respectfully with what she prefers to call “tradition”. In her estimation this interest in animism “counts for something. Its importance can’t be overstated” – and she tells us why. Nonetheless, despite celebrating the growing interest in the larger-than-human relationships to which “animism” can point, she challenges us to face the violent history that has diminished or destroyed many lives.

Hogan’s essay “We Call it Tradition” opens this book because it fuses celebration and challenge. It does not survey all the kinds of phenomena that are labelled “animism” but initiates a reconsideration of contemporary and historical indigenous life-ways and knowledges. By inviting us to engage, to relate, to participate, it offers a powerful foundation for the recognition (honoured in many later chapters) that the study of animism is more than the collection, description and analysis of facts about other lives. The approaches to learning and teaching which we adopt and perform are important elements of the relationships we have with the larger community (the world). Studies of animism entail provocative re-evaluations of all ways of being, acting, thinking and relating.

Nurit Bird-David’s essay “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology” (1999) has served as a milestone in the journey of many scholars. It clearly set out what earlier scholarship about animism had achieved and presaged the changing direction scholars had begun to take. Now, in “Animism, Conservation and Immediacy”, Danny Naveh and Nurit Bird-David further develop their arguments which reflect on fieldwork among the Nayaka of South India. Having established the centrality of relationality in the epistemology of people who can be called “animists”, here they provide a clarification about the importance of intimacy. In contrast with dominant models of conservation (illustrated here by a UNESCO project in India’s Nilgiris hills), they insist that animist relationality is not something vague, diffuse or theoretical, but entails intimate acts of knowing specific local “others”. Just as the Ojibwe elder interviewed by Irving Hallowell (1960) demonstrated that the important question is not whether all rocks are alive but whether specific humans relate appropriately (respectfully) with specific rocks, so for the Nayaka it is important to know how one might act appropriately towards particular elephants. Cultural or religious ecologies continue to be a significant topic for debate in many disciplines – and are embedded in the even larger topic of the use and value of terms like “nature” and “culture”.

In Chapter 3 we have the summation of the late Ken Morrison’s academic career: a programmatic proposal for a post-Cartesian anthropology. Following conversations with Morrison prior to his untimely death, and in consultation with his notes, David Shorter was able to add the finishing touches to the chapter. This sets out the ways in which indigenous animists and those who research among them (or the historical record of ancestral lives and ideas) may contribute to a revision in the ways in which scholarly activities are pursued. Inspired by Irving Hallowell and what he learnt among his Ojibwe hosts – and attending to Hallowell’s evolving learning and practice – and drawing on his own research about European and indigenous encounters in northeastern North America, Morrison begins with the question “Are they human?” He traces answers (whether conflicting or compatible) proffered by anthropologists, indigenous peoples, enlightenment ideologues and theists. Morrison sets out the implications for an anthropology that respects relationality as definitive not only for the worldviews of “others” but especially for future ways of gaining and valuing knowledge everywhere.

Edward Tylor’s nineteenth-century account of animism sometimes appears as a foil against which more recent scholars test their approaches and theories. It deserves consideration both because such a wealth of data requires explanation – whether or not this is in agreement with Tylor – and because Tylor’s theory of religion continues to influence many of our contemporaries. In Chapter 4, Robert Segal expertly delineates what Tylor proposed and achieved. In particular, he sets out Tylor’s ideas about the relationship between religion and science. He asks whether the kind of thing Tylor called animism and the kind of theory he proposed survive today and what such survivals might mean. In the following chapter, Martin Stringer also seeks to know whether Tylor’s kind of animism exists today. He is interested in the specific possibility of finding animism in popular or vernacular religiosity in Sierra Leone and in Britain. How do people speak about and engage with those who have died? How do the ways in which people cope with life and death draw on, but not always precisely match, official formulations of a culture’s ideas?

These opening chapters raise issues and present arguments about people who might be identified as animists and about practices and ideas that might be described as animism. They do not pretend to cover every possible variation, but focus on some of the main ways in which kinds of animism can be approached, presented and/or understood. They not only set the scene for what follows but also encapsulate much of the excitement and importance surrounding animism.

1

We call it tradition

Linda Hogan

All over the earth the faces of all living things have been

created by Mother earth with great tenderness.

Luther Standing Bear (cited in DeMallie 1985: 288)

At night, outside, I watch the constellations move across the curve of black sky. The Great Hand moves toward the horizon. This is the hand that offers help for the souls of the dead to step on the path commonly called the Milky Way, or the way of nurturance. This is where they begin their journey along this Path of Spirits to the world of souls. In Greek astronomy this hand would be a part of the constellation called Orion, but we have many different skies, all held with equal respect. I like the compassion offered by the Hand to the dead.

Indigenous astronomies vary for different indigenous nations. My Navajo sister, Nancy Mary Boy, uses a travelling planetarium to teach others the Navajo sky world. What is most fascinating to me in her stories of the night sky is the constellation called The Feather. When The Feather touches earth, lightning strikes. Lightning wakes the beetles, the bears, every sleeping creature dwelling inside their dens of winter earth. They emerge into the time of rising plants. Farther north, people say two constellations must come together to create this same lightning that opens the season of spring.

Our astronomies come from our own environments and ways of comprehending the world through knowledge systems and mythologies, and through many thousands of years of sky observances. All of these are based on the unique ecosystems of each nation of people, and sometimes from stories shared with our friends and allies as we journeyed long distances by water and across land. With the many indigenous habitats, numerous ways of knowing and storying exist. Indigenous knowledge is also an authentic science gained from direct observation and relationship with the world around us.

This night, as the sky seems to cross this spinning, tilted world, I think about the word, animism, and what this newly accepted area of study means to those of us whose cognitive and spiritual worlds are already created by our rivers, mountains and forests. For those who have always prayed with, to, and for the waters, and known our intimate relatives, the plant people, the animals, insects, and all our special relations, the field of animism is a belated study. It has not gone unnoticed that without these relationships, a great pain and absence has been suffered by humanity, an absence and loss we ourselves have felt as a result of the determinations of the Western mind to separate us from our homelands, and which has created great destruction to the living body of the continent. We know our own pain as we have been forced, often through violent means by the governing politics, to take up values vastly different from our own.

As a descendent of the mound-builders of the Southeastern United States, I stand in awe that along bends in the rivers, on flood plains and other regions, our ancestors created thousands of earthworks. Each effigy mound, burial site or pyramid took many hundreds of years and many generations of people to create. Our ancestors were people who loved the sky and creatures of the world so deeply that they expressed their care over time and space, using their own hands to carry baskets of clay from riverbanks to make mounds and pyramids, some white clay on one side, red on the other. With an extraordinary knowledge of geometry, the world has been shaped into the forms of frog and turtle and even the water spider in one region, all animals who dwell in two elements, land and water. The habitation of more than one realm is significant to a culture which takes notes of both the sky world and that beneath water, worships both sunlight and the night sky. In other locations mounds are shaped as birds with smaller birds flying beneath the wings of those larger. Bear mound effigies have been created not far from the mountain lion and deer. No species has gone unnoticed. The Great Serpent Mound, based on solar, lunar and other cosmic knowledge, continues to astound the tourists who visit, as does Cahokia and other remains of America’s early cities or ceremonial centres which were as large as London or Paris in earlier times.

I call these earthworks a literature which remains as testimony of our presence, each a letter to the sky, a statement of earth love. These mounds were created by a people in constant observance in the ecosystem and stories of every angle of light, movement of life across the land. The mounds that haven’t been overly explored, dismantled, numbered and reconstructed are still felt sites of living power and energy. These places of special energy on the earth reveal an evolved consciousness at work in creation, the accumulation of knowledge, spirituality and myth we do not often recollect today because the history of the country has transpired in the loss of such qualities.

Other earthworks have been found in Peru with the intriguing Nazca lines, in the Amazon basin, and numerous other places, even those unremembered by us in the Northern Plains of our own country. The cosmic worlds of indigenous peoples on all continents are yet to be revealed and perhaps best kept in secret since many of these have unfortunately been discovered as forests and other water-preserving environments have been destroyed.

Animism is the word scholars now use to define the worldview and intelligence that went into such creations and that “begins” to understand other than Western ways of knowing. However, it is not a term traditional indigenous peoples would use to describe our relationship with, and love for, the world around us. Nor is it a word that fully defines the complexity of knowledge systems we have had of the world around us. At least on the surface of its new territory, the study doesn’t yet take in the thousands of centuries of historical relationships and intimate kinship with the land and our companion species. Nor does it consider how diverse indigenous languages contain and hold within them the embedded knowledge and deep science of our natural habitats, some containing more meanings in a single word than could be held in ideas written in a book in the English language, others with more verbs and ways of using them than the entire number of words that exist in the entire vocabulary of other languages.

For tribal peoples, our relationships and kinship with the alive world is simply called tradition. We are either traditionally minded or we are still in the process of decolonizing ourselves, in various locations of the stage of learning where we have been in this long history. Some of us are still shedding the long and violent process of acculturation. Some have not yet begun. Many of the numerous losses we have had are due to Christianity. We had little choice but to be converted, and the Papal Bull called for the annihilation of many millions of Native peoples. Other losses are due to stolen lands with which we kept our knowledge, and to the many forms Western education took, none of which any of us have escaped, and which is part of the same world now teaching classes called “animism”.

These invasions, not just of the land, body and spirit, but the cognitive invasions, are what Yupiaq Oscar Kawagley (2006) calls “cognitive imperialism”. In his book A Yupiaq Worldview, he says that the people’s consciousness has allowed them to survive in a good way for centuries and asks why outsiders should try to change that thinking.

The traditional knowledge of the environment, history and language, and relationships in all of their intricacies must be taken into the new animism, and its roots continue to grow. For indigenous people on all continents, these worldviews have been a way of cultural and physical survival, each one a way so complex that it might be a lifetime of study. Our sisters and brothers around the world have been participants within these worldviews long before European contact or other invasions which we were not meant to survive. Nevertheless, throughout all the changes in the world our relationships of equality, our values toward other species are remembered as much as has been possible throughout the fur trades and other times when we broke with our own traditions.

This beautiful way of seeing was recalled in words spoken by Onondaga elder, Oren Lyons, at the first meeting of international indigenous peoples with the United Nations NGOs in the 1970s when he said in Geneva, “I see no seat for the eagles”. Nor did he see a place for the rest of creation, and since their voices were not heard, his words were a reminder that we humans stand somewhere between the “mountain and the ant, there and only there, as part and parcel of creation”. How greatly we have overvalued ourselves and ignored the other intelligences around us.

Our realities were established in the long ago and our relationship with the other life forms has held together the worlds of those who are traditional. Our care for the land is a non-negotiable treaty. It is natural law and one that requires spiritual responsibilities as well as a way of being with the land, on the rivers, the ocean, our treatment of each life. As a writer, I consider it part of my work to re-member¹ all this, to even state how the world knows us, the human people. The animals and even the insects see us. The panther, one of our own Chickasaw clan animals, is the focus of my novel Power (1999). One section, reproduced here with some editing, is seen through the eyes of Sisa, the most endangered species, the Florida panther. Sisa sees the other species lost, a world changed, places of loss and destruction due to agriculture, ranching, golf courses, and the new ways of the people:

The panther misses its companions, the blue-green crocodile, the many silver-sided fish, bear, and the delicate wood stork, all nearly gone. It wants to believe they will return. Sisa sees now that in place of the red wolf, the damp fur of the bear, the world has given way to cleared and empty space where the poor awkward cattle have no sheltering shade to lie down in but their own; they are clasped to the ground and along with their human-bred shadows they are eight-legged creatures of doubleness. Sisa knows that to eat them, even when she is hungry, is to be killed, but nevertheless they are food, nothing more.

The world has grown small where Sisa lives. It has lost its power and given way to highways and streets of towns where once there were woods and fens and bodies of water. The world is made less by these losses. Because of this, humans have lost the chance to be whole and joyous, reverent and alive. They live in square lots apart even from one another. What they’ve forgotten is large and immense, and what they remember is only a small, narrow hopelessness.

The panther remembers when humans were so beautiful and whole that her own people admired the way the two-legged people stood beneath trees with leaves leaning down over them as they picked ripe fruits, how their eyes were fully open. How straight they walked! How beautiful the beads around their necks, the dresses women made in fabric that was the dark green of trees and the colours of flowers. How good they were at devising ways to catch fish with simple bone. They stood so gracefully and full of themselves, they sang so beautifully, it remembers all this, how they sang. The whole world rejoiced with their voices. They were her little brothers and sisters.

The human story is the same as that of the natural world with its animals, water, the movement of the sky, rising plants, and even, as evidenced in our diverse artwork and ceremonies, the mountain and the ant.

About mountains: many mountains throughout the world are sacred sites. These great earth creations are visited regularly. In their majestic being, they are the boundaries of worlds, nations and memories. Dogen, a monk, wrote in The Mountain and Rivers Sutra that the mountains walk, it is just that they walk in their own time, not ours. This is a wisdom to be daily remembered about the world around us.

Long before the people of China suffered their movement from village life into the despair of Chinese capitalism with its overly long hours of repetitive factory labour for the production of cheap goods, there was once a time when it was thought that different gods lived in each part of the human body. Each human was sacred. It was, and in places it still is, thought that mountains were immortals. As they are.

The Tibetan Buddhists recognize their mother mountain, a sacred site, one climbed often in order to deliver prayers and prayer flags of red, yellow, blue, a rainbow of prayers, language and song on the mountain. Yet now the mountains are melting at a rapid rate due to global climate change. As the snow melts more rapidly it flows down the river toward the sea, and, like our own Mississippi River, it picks up agricultural chemicals, human waste, trash and illegally dumped toxins. It rushes through and past Cambodia into the ocean where all these...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: DIFFERENT ANIMISMS
• PART II: DWELLING IN NATURE/CULTURE
• PART III: DWELLING IN LARGER-THAN-HUMAN COMMUNITIES
• PART IV: DWELLING WITH(OUT) THINGS
• PART V: DEALING WITH SPIRITS
• PART VI: CONSCIOUSNESS AND WAYS OF KNOWING
• PART VII: ANIMISM IN PERFORMANCE
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index