I run an animist investment vehicle, Ground Effect, https://www.groundeffect.io/, and I get asked often what is animism! Some thoughts below. For me personally, it’s a belief system and a system of embodied practice that sees other entities in the world as fully alive, as my kin, extensions of my own family, with whom I am a full equal. It destabilises notions of human supremacy or exceptionalism. It is a relational epistemology.
And yes, in case you hadn’t noticed, Lifeworlds is an animist podcast.
“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”
“The indigenous mindset accepts feelings as a primary way through which the collective of beings is approached, understood, and addressed. Contact to other beings, and to other humans, is primarily established through feeling”
“A commons is not a resource, but a set of relationships”
“In the emerging new picture, organisms are no longer viewed as genetic machines, but basically as materially embodied processes that bring forth themselves (Weber & Varela 2003, Weber 2010). They are matter, organisation, but also meaning, existential experience, and poetic expression. Each single cell is a ‘process of creation of an identity’ (Varela 1997). Already the simplest organism must be understood as being a material system displaying the desire to keep itself intact, to grow, to unfold, and to produce a fuller scope of life for itself. A cell is a process that produces the components necessary to allow for these developments”
“Surely, however, the most intriguing question is why and how the modernist project estranged itself from the tendency to animate things, if it is indeed universal. How and why did it stigmatize ‘‘animistic language’’ as a child’s practice, against massive evidence (see Guthrie 1993) to the contrary? How did it succeed in delegitimating animism as a valid means to knowledge, constantly fending off the impulse to deploy it and regarding it as an ‘‘incurable disease’’?
Multispecies design
Other readings…
https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/magic-and-the-machine/
https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/the-enlivenment-manifesto-politics-and-poetics-in-the-anthropocene/