What Is Animism? Understanding Relational Reality

Thyia River North
Feb 12
15 min read

Updated: Feb 19

Before any of my work will serve its purpose, you really must have a foundational understanding of the history and context of this most essential topic: animism!

Basically all of my work centers around the concept of animism, but the definition of what this actually means might be lost in the muddy waters of what animism was thought to be and what animism has only recently come to be understood as through relational understanding and a reclamation of Indigenous knowledge.

IS ANIMISM A BELIEF TO CLAIM?

The term "animism" came on the scene as a way for the white mind to understand what seemed to be a different way of relating to the world than it had ever encountered previously. Because of this "different way", animism as a word was stained with the racist, eugenic tone only a white man born in the 1800s could have when defining something he himself could not comprehend. It was not a term that elicited the warm sense of an alive world that we might feel associated with it now; instead, it was a term of racist judgment: a description of a way of relating to the world seen in peoples outside of the "civilized" west.

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) was a British anthropologist, considered the "father of cultural anthropology," (sure, right) who literally sat at home and gave (colonial, racist, violent) opinions on anything under the scope of anthropology--this was not even a man who was out in the field meeting the peoples who he deemed himself intelligent enough to write about. He coined animism and defined it as, and I paraphrase: "the belief that natural objects and phenomena have souls/spirits."

Now, on first glance, this might not seem problematic, but that's what I want to get into: why animism is not the belief in other-than-humans having a soul/spirit. This is not the belief in an ensouled world. And I'm here to give context to what that means and why it's important, especially for us who were contextually raised to assume this understanding.

To give you a little taste of Tylor's (extremely opinionated) writing, here's a quote from his Primitive Culture, which I read so you don't have to: "Animism [is a belief existing] . . . in that early state of the human mind which gives consistent individual life to phenomena that our utmost stretch of fancy only avails to personify in conscious metaphor."¹

Outside of being flagrantly rude, this statement has a multitude of errors: one, animism is not a belief in the sense of holding a proposition to be true, it is an ontological function of reality; two, animism is not about attributing human-like souls to things (sup, Christian worldview); third, animism is fundamentally relational; it is a way of engaging reality in reciprocity, not just a taxonomical function that places 'object' in the "Has Spirit" category and somehow validates its being through this organizational work.

For Tylor, this "belief" was "primitive and childlike," but the truth is that animism, as it was understood, wasn't a belief at all, but a relational disposition toward our world. His definition was born from violently misunderstanding a worldview that was held across peoples before the western mind became dominant, and yet, this definition is still held to be the general understanding of animism today, even by those of us who would absolutely detest to know these origins.

You can understand why, in our times of reclaiming this term, there could (and maybe should?) be resistance to using a term with this origin. But, like a lot of these things, there seems to need to be, at the very least, massive clarification—if not full reconciliation work akin to cleaning up a BP oil spill. And the term 'animism' seems here to stay. So let's clean it up!

THE "NEW" ANIMISM FINDS A VOICE

"New" Animism (god, these terms) has been doing some heavy lifting since Tylor (may his name be forgotten) so indelicately defined animism from his assumptions about, well, everything, and his inability to relate to anything so foreign as relationship. (eyeroll)

But it wasn't until the 1930s that we begin to see this work of untangling begin through the writings of a man by the name of Irving Hallowell. However, the trouble here is that this man learned everything he wrote about from his supposed "friend" and "teacher," an Anishinaabe elder by the name of Chief William Berens, but whom Hallowell anonymizes in his published works. Reclamation of the term, maybe, but at the cost of yet another Indigenous teacher becoming faceless under the written work of a white man.

Chief William Berens and Irving Hallowell, the beginnings of understanding animism through a relational lens. — Berens (left) and Hallowell (right)

It is said that Hallowell sought to understand Indigenous animistic cultures in North America without "projecting . . . categorical abstractions derived from Western thought,"² but he fails to credit the very person that gifted him this knowledge. Thankfully, work has been done by Tim Ingold, Jennifer Brown, and Susan Elaine Gray to restore Berens' name and honor what he gifted us through these conversations with Hallowell.

Regardless of this unkindness, Hallowell argued that the Ojibwe's understanding of animacy in beings "which to us clearly belong to a physical inanimate category"² centers around a social and relational model of 'personhood' that transcends the individualistic, anthropocentric limitations of Western philosophical and legal definitions. He coined the term "other-than-human persons" to help us with the language here.

I'll note two of the stories attributed to Berens:

1: Hallowell: "Are all the stones we see about us here alive?"

Berens (after reflecting a long while): "No! But some are."²

2: An account³ of an old man (likely Berens) and his wife in their tent during a storm. Thunder claps.

The man listens intently, then turns to his wife and asks: "Did you hear what was said?"

She replies: "No, I didn't catch it."

Tim Ingold synthesized, from these and other conversations, that Berens taught that animacy is relational and contextual, not a fixed property. Stones aren't inherently "alive" or "dead." Says Ingold in Anthropology: Why It Matters, "It is not, then, that life is in stones. Rather, stones are in life. Life isn't something contained within objects. Life is a force or current in which all things participate. We swim in the current of life for a while, then swim out of it."³

This is radical, I believe, and is the start of untangling where we, ourselves, might recognize the tangle within, too. Because within the words "life is not in stones; stones are in life" we find an entirely different framework for our reality. Where before we were thinking we needed to do the work of noting life within all things, now we step back into the boundless wave of understanding that all things are within life. Where Tylor thought these peoples were placing soul within object, we now realize that he would have been closer to say they were placing objects within soul. We are, then, seeing that Beingness is inherent and the relational understanding of where things stand in that Beingness kind of, well, isn't the point, because all things stand in Beingness and the location within that matters only to the understanding of Form, but not in inherent nature.

[*If you'd like to read more of these, the book Memories, Myths, and Dreams of an Ojibwe Leader (edited by Brown and Gray, 2009)⁴ contains Berens' actual words from Hallowell's field notes, all of his reminiscences, stories, and teachings. Another work of Tim Ingold's where Berens is spoken of is The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (Tim Ingold, 2000).⁵]

"NEW" ANIMISM GETS MORE LIGHT THROUGH DIVIDUAL THEORY

I want to build something in here that might get a little esoteric and, well, wiggly. With Ingold's synthesis of Berens' words, "life is not in stones, stones are in life" something really interesting begins to take shape that gets much more fleshed out in a theory that comes much later than Hallowell's work, called Dividual Theory. But we need to step lightly here.

This work started with McKim Marriott in the '70s and was built upon by Marilyn Strathern in the '80s. I mention the names so you can reference this if you want to explore further, but I'm going to sum up a bit since this isn't necessarily about Dividual Theory, it's just a part of things that adds to the ontological whole, and to the larger picture of what I'm trying to paint here.

The basic understanding of dividual personhood is this: rather than being a fixed, bounded self, a dividual person is composite (made up of relations from multiple sources), partible (able to be divided or distributed), permeable (open to influences that shape them from within), and relational in essence (literally constituted by relationships, not just someone who has relationships).

Marriott defined this through the material and moral, what he called "substance-codes."⁶ Dividual exists through substance exchange and flows between bodies. Persons are made of transmissible substances (blood, food, semen, knowledge, etc.) that circulate between bodies and carry codes of conduct with them. This was informed by the time and the place: South Asia in the 1970s. And it was in response to a dominant theory at the time that personhood, specifically Indian personhood was about hierarchy. Instead, Marriott argued, it was about dynamic flows and exchanges. Basically, you're always in flux through exchange.

For Strathern, this was structural and relational.⁷ What that means is that personhood is defined, essentially, as relationship. So, dividual is being composed of relationships themselves. You don't have a self that enters relationships, you literally are your relationships. Like, made up of them, and cannot exist outside of them.

To make this all the more simple, the main gist is that we're not stable entities who have relationships--we're in the flow of life, constituted differently moment by moment, all depending on how life is moving through us and around us.

So here I want to relate it back to Berens and Tim Ingold: you can't step in the same river twice--you can't be the same self twice. Within dividual theory, this is because the self is nothing but the current configuration of relationships in this moment, but we'll see that even without the understanding, necessarily, of only being made of relationships, this remains seemingly true to the relationality of existence itself. For dividual theory, when different relationships are activated, different parts of you are elicited, and you become a different composite. When we are in life, we are in relationship, so we are arising different parts of ourselves moment to moment through the relational field of life itself.

And in that sense, this perfectly mirrors mystical understanding within esoteric traditions and metaphysics: the cosmos is being created fresh in every instant--there's no continuity except the continuous act of being brought into being. You're not a stable self moving through time. You're a being created anew each moment in relationship to Being (Life) itself.

So in relational animism the illusion of a stable selfhood is understood quite literally: we exist in relationship to life itself and arise in each moment a new self, a new beingness, and all of this beingness is a part of the larger Being of Reality.

For me, this next leap is important, as I work in the realm of spiritual teaching and study spiritual teaching. You could just contemplate the function of relationship as a changeable force in your life and see how in literally every instance you are becoming anew, but I also want to present this from the spiritual consideration of "God" as relational Being.

The admonition to submit yourself to "God" is not submission through God's domination of you like religion would like us to believe. Living a life in submission to "God" is living a life in submission to relational reality. You do not assert Self as static, but self as continuous unfolding. It is participation in the moment-to-moment expression of life itself. It is you as River, as Flow, as Being. This is the work of knowing oneself, this is the Sacred Self which knows itself in relation to the Radical Other

SO WHAT ABOUT ANIMISM NOW?

Building on the related theoretical work of Strathern in the 1980s, anthropologist Nurit Bird-David (1999) marked the crystallization of what became known as "new" animism.⁸ Her article "'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology" published in Current Anthropology (1999) is the touchstone paper that brings this all together.

In this article, Bird-David gives a reformulation of animism as a relational epistemology, not the "simple religion" and "failure" it was previously defined as when viewed from modernist perspectives. She critiques all of these old and new perspectives and offers her own relational lens.

This was the work that had profound impact on me. Previously, I did not understand animism had gone through such an insane evolution from "primitive belief" to actual relational epistemology, and I certainly didn't realize how essential it would be to the self-work of my spiritual practice--at least not like this. When I first came to animism, I was doing what a lot of us with western minds do: assuming the "ensouled" nature of reality. But this really does a disservice to the workability of animism as a foundational context for how we relate to ourselves and one another. It bridges the gap of Self and Other, while still maintaining the radical independence of both as relational beings within the larger web of reality and not just as inherently alive things unto themselves.

Bird-David is arguing in this work that the animist is not a person who mistakenly projected souls onto objects. Instead, she is saying that the animist isn't projecting anything, but instead that they're experiencing the world through a dividual ontology where persons (human and nonhuman) are constituted through relationships; beings are distributed, partible, emplaced in multiple sites; there's no hard boundary between "self" and "world;" and relationships are constitutive, not just connecting pre-existing entities. With this definition, an animist doesn't "know" the world, an animist "relates" to the world. There is no need for definition and categorization--though that also need not be thrown out. But the essential ground of life becomes the direct immediacy of present relationship, not the definitions of what we think we know it to be.

A BIT FURTHER TO REACH OUR DESTINATION

To begin to bring this all home, I'd like to reference the work of Martin Buber in I and Thou (1923). In this (rather complicated) work, Buber says, "Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation."⁹

This may be a confusing sentence to parse. It may seem like he is stating that standing in relationship we have nothing, which we might define as a negative thing. But what he means here is that you come to an encounter empty-handed and that anything you would bring creates the circumstance of an experience, not a relational moment. But what you do have is that you are, by nature, standing in relationship. And that is enough.

Relationship is reciprocity through encounter of Self and Other and the exchange therein.

Buber, I believe, was addressing us from the gap of thinking of ourselves as static individuals while trying to bridge it toward relational animism. We of Western mind had no concept of there being the possibility of the dividual. Because of this, he was needing to build the idea of relationality and the dividual in relationship THROUGH the lens of the individual and to show us there is a choice to relate differently.

Understanding of personhood is not universal. Some cultures conceive persons as dividual rather than individual and this changes the very structure of how personal dynamics play out. This inherent difference in understanding begins to show us how flexible this way we define ourselves and our world truly is. But if we don't take a mindful approach to how we integrate this into our understanding and to make conscious choice about how, then, we want to define it for ourselves, we may slip into ways of understanding that don't actually align to how we want to see our world and our place within it. We may be relating through the lens of a rube like Tylor and not through our own inquisitive, curious, and ultimately genuine exploration of reality and what, ultimately, feels True in our hearts.

WHY DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER TO SPIRITUAL WORK?

The interesting thing about animism is that a lot of us of late have taken it on as a reactionary response to the dead world we were made to be a part of in modern religious and western-minded paradigms without really doing the work of understanding what we're signing onto and what baggage we might be bringing into the view.

And this isn't meant to be twenty lashings to our already guilt-drenched consciences. But the reality is that an unexamined view is one that, by nature, fills in the gaps through assumption and projection simply to make sense of its life. And that's okay, the mind's job is to make sense of our reality, even if it's doing so stained by the dominant worldview of empire and religious dogma. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen the weaselly-est shit get sifted through into something I thought I'd already cleaned up and cleared out.

But that's what practice is for, right? To clean the mirror through which we view ourselves and our world every time we notice a bit of grime has gotten on it. That is the practice of maintaining one's Ingenium, or our natural expression. As Frater Acher says in a work of the same name, "Our job as magicians is not to direct the doves, to follow the fishes or to catch the light. Our job is to polish the glass, to clean the dovecote, to unleash the river."¹⁰ And if that feels a little vague, I highly recommend the book. This is a topic I will get into in future, as well.

But animism is one of those cultural revolutions that quietly took a good many of us by storm, sweeping us up into a world that felt full of warmth, light, and relationships that didn't have to be only of human origin. It gave us the freedom to find solace in the other-than-human persons we interacted with daily, whether that be our pets and houseplants or the river we live near and never took much mind of previously. It gave us the chance to feel more connected without having to relate more to humanity, who, I might add, is collectively getting on our last nerve. We have this sort of love-hate relationship with our own kind--and with validity!--and animism gave us permission to seek safety and understanding elsewhere.

This permission is essential in being able not only to feel like we can be in relationship with our world, but that we are in relationship. It gave us a sense that we could relate through not our humanality, but our animality, our spiritedness, our beingness. It doesn't, however, automatically bridge the gap back to our humanity, and it doesn't, I think, even incline us toward a desire to do so, though I think this, too, is a part of the healing needed for the whole.

Regardless of what it does or doesn't do, animism is essential as a framework and it is the basics of understanding to get us closer to a place of reciprocal relationality. But animism can not do this work on its own. It provides the view, but it does not bring forth the vision into our lived reality unless we do the inner work to make it possible. Just because it's real, ontologically understood, and obvious, doesn't mean we are actually living in its image.

So my encouragement becomes, then, that we start to do the reciprocal work of actually implementing this view into our manifest life. That we live from this place of relationship and begin to see its effects ripple out into our world just a little more each day.

The world has given us this gift. What are we going to give in return? And might that gift be our hands, our minds, and our hearts to carry forth this way into our lives each and every day?

If you made it this far, I appreciate your attention. If this work is of interest to you, below are ways to work with me and learn more:

This is the work I eat and breathe, and, consequently, teach: relational animism and personal sovereignty through self-knowledge. And why is it important now? Because this is the work of becoming radically ourselves, able to reclaim the colonized ground within so we can restore the ground without. This is the work of becoming whole to ourselves so we don't strip our world bare looking for what we think is missing outside of ourselves.

If you're interested in this from a personal practice point of view, you might want to join us in the Imaginal Collective, where we are doing practice together to develop the self-knowledge and presence that will reveal who you naturally are and what you have to offer. This is where you strengthen the muscle of being yourself, of beginning to relate from wholeness, and in shaping a vision for who we can be as individuals and collectively.

Through my sacred unity of Self & Other writing and teaching, you can explore the philosophical frameworks for understanding how we move from projection to genuine relationship with all beings—human and more-than-human, with ourselves and with each other. Most of this work is available free on the blog. This will get you familiar with the concepts before jumping into practice.

And then on the commercial side of things, I offer Spirit of Place Mediation, where I work with businesses to establish relational harmony with the spirits of place and the people who work and visit there as a way to further embody this path, not just in our personal lives, but in our professional and commercial landscape, as well. I find this to be just as important as how we relate one to another and one to nature because this area is much more stained with the impression of extractive forms of relating than anything else.

References:

Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: John Murray, 1871.
Hallowell, A. Irving. "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View." In Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, edited by Stanley Diamond, 19-52. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.
Ingold, Tim. Anthropology: Why It Matters. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
Brown, Jennifer S.H., and Susan Elaine Gray, eds. Memories, Myths, and Dreams of an Ojibwe Leader. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000.
Marriott, McKim. "Hindu Transactions: Diversity Without Dualism." In Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, edited by Bruce Kapferer, 109-142. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976.
Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Bird-David, Nurit. "'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology." Current Anthropology 40, supplement (1999): S67-S91.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribner, 1970. (Original work published 1923)
Acher, Frater. Ingenium: Alchemy of the Magical Mind. Illustrated by Joseph Uccello. Quareia Publishing UK, 2022.