The Revival of Animism in the 21st Century

The academic concept of “animism” has a long and complicated history. Born from a colonial setting around 1900, it was used to identify premodern or “primitive” understandings of certain nonhuman entities or objects as being alive, ensouled, and agentic. Because of its European depiction as a “failed ontology,” and the heavy colonial baggage this depiction entails, the concept was criticized and went almost out of use in mainstream anthropology and the academic study of religion. Around the turn of the 21st century, however, a different interpretation of animism was (re)introduced, which focused on animism as a relational approach to the world rather than as ontological claims about nonhuman entities. Many scholars in the emerging field of “new animism” base their considerations on spiritual practices in Europe and North America that use the concept of animism in a positive way. This is true for many forms of paganism, nature-based spiritualities, and environmental activism. In a parallel, and in fact intertwined, movement, academic theories have been developed across disciplines and intellectual traditions that conceptualize relationality, nonhuman agency, and entanglements of life forms in a way that strives to overcome influential binaries such as subject–object, nature–culture, mind–matter, or human–nonhuman. These theories, in turn, materialize in literature and art, and they influence political and spiritual practice in many ways. In what can be called animism’s double-bind, new animism is a mode of critique of exactly those binary constructions that originate in European hegemonic thinking. While the idea of animism, due to its colonial legacy, should no longer be applied as a generic concept to a particular “type” of religion, its revival in Euro-American discourse at the turn of the 21st century can, ironically, be interpreted as a subversive attempt to decolonize the hegemonic tradition that constructed European (white, male) humans as detached from the rest of planetary life and as the pinnacle of evolution and creation.