Article
Animism in the
Anthropocene
Arianne Conty
American University of Sharjah
Abstract
Following upon Bruno Latour’s famous injunction that ‘we have never been modern’,
Graham Harvey has recently added that perhaps ‘we have always been animists.’
With the massive ecosystem destruction that is underway in the Anthropocene,
this realization could represent a necessary paradigm shift to address anthropogenic
climate change. If the expropriation and destruction intrinsic to the modern division
between a world of cultural values attributed exclusively to humans and a world of
inanimate matter devoid of value has become untenable, then showing the illusory
nature of this divide should open the way for a transvaluation of values capable of
developing an animistic relational ontology to replace the dualisms of the Western
paradigm. Developing the four traits typical of animistic cultures – personhood,
relationality, location and ontological boundary crossing – a postmodern ‘machinic
animism’ is defended as a new ecological paradigm for the Anthropocene.
Keyword
animism, Anthropocene, Fe´lix Guattari, indigenous ecology, Bruno Latour, machinic
animism, Viveiros de Castro
Je suis devenu un peu animiste, il m’arrive de dialoguer avec les
oiseaux. (Descola and Palsson, 1996)
I Introduction
In a play on Bruno Latour’s famously destabilizing claim that ‘we have
never been modern’, Professor of Religious Studies Graham Harvey has
recently added ‘but perhaps we have always been animists’ (Harvey,
2014: 11). Indeed, these two comments are more closely linked than
one might at ﬁrst infer. It was the anthropology of non-Western cultures
Theory, Culture & Society
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that inspired Latour’s intellectual journey and his famous claim, since it
is precisely this discipline that treats the empirical, the social and the
linguistic as a continuous whole. It is through studying comparative
anthropology that Latour was able to understand the nature of technology
and undermine the dualities of subject and object, nature and cul-
ture,1
natural science and social science. Because we cannot access the
motivations and goals within other agents, modernity typically separated
the human as active and the rest of matter as acted upon. Showing how
a-modern cultures had no trouble attributing agency to objects, subjects,
spirits and tools helped Latour to separate agency from its supposed
cause in a uniquely human interiority characterized by intentionality
and purposive action, and thus to look more objectively at the forms
of agency at work in the world. It is time, Latour famously pointed out in
in his book We Have Never Been Modern, to see ourselves the way we are
able to see the natives of non-modern cultures, and to send ethnologists
to study the modern tribe of ‘scientiﬁc researchers or engineers’. The
ethnologist (Latour himself) would notice that his modern informants
adamantly refused to see their projections onto nature and would therefore
conclude that ‘For social reasons . . . Western scientists require a
dualist attitude’ (Latour, 1993: 102). If Western scientists assumed one
nature and many diﬀerent cultures, non-modern peoples take for granted
one culture and many diﬀerent natures. This ideological reversal represents
what Latour calls a ‘bomb with the potential to explode the whole
implicit philosophy so dominant in most ethnographers’ interpretation of
their material’ (see Turner, 2009: 27). It is this bomb that we will be
seeking to detonate by defending an animist ontology in which agency
is attributed to all of life.
But if ‘we have always been animists’ then objectifying the world from
the position of a subject was always merely a projection, a reiﬁcation.
Latour’s a-modernism thus represents a ‘return of the repressed’ since we
are now forced to acknowledge what was pushed below the surface to
constitute what he calls ‘the unconscious of the moderns’ (Latour, 1993:
37). Indeed, studies in genetic and developmental psychology have shown
that animism is a natural predisposition in the human being, unlearned
only through a long process of socialization.2
According to Kate Wright,
the repression of animism in modern thinking represents a major pathology.
An animistic renaissance could thus function as an alternative to
and a cure for the divisions and dichotomies founded in the human
exceptionalism at the core of modern values. It constitutes what
Wright (2014: 278) calls:
an attempt to address the systemic pathology of a species disconnected
from the conditions of its world. Becoming-with oﬀers a
metaphysics grounded in connection, challenging delusions of
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
separation – the erroneous belief that it is somehow possible to
exempt ourselves from Earth’s ecological community.
If animism has thus been repressed and unlearned, this is largely due to
the modern categorization of animism as belonging to the primitive past
of indigenous populations,3
populations that would eventually accept the
‘mission civilisatrice’ of the West and the forward march of progress
(Rosengren, 2018). Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena comments:
A century ago, the idea of indigenous people as an active force in
the contemporary world was unthinkable. According to most
Western thinkers, native societies belonged to an earlier, inferior
stage of human history doomed to extinction by the forward
march of progress and history . . . History has not turned out that
way at all. Many tribal societies have indeed been wiped out by war,
disease, exploitation, and cultural assimilation over these last centuries.
But far from vanishing as the conﬁdent predictions once had
it, native peoples today show demographic strength, even growth.
(De la Cadena and Starn, 2007: 1)
Though there are still diehard modernists who continue to identify
animism with the past, such views testify to what Gisli Palsson (1996:
69) has called ‘environmental orientalism’, the hubristic attitude of colonizers
responsible for the desecration and oppression of peoples and
ecosystems across the world. Equating animistic cultures with nature,
such moderns saw animists as virtually sub-human, since they assigned
social roles to the non-human world. Along the arrow of progress, such
primitive peoples could be subjugated and expropriated just as natural
resources were, or else educated to recognize the separation of nature
from culture, and thereby enter the domain of humanity proper. Anselme
Franke (2012: 169) explains how animism functioned for modernity as
what he calls a ‘negative mirror image’ in order to construct its identity
over and against an identity it could relegate to the primitive past.
In her book Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason
(2001), environmental philosopher Val Plumwood calls this extirpation a
‘remoteness’ promoted by ‘sado-dispassionate science’, which uses an
‘ideology of disengagement to wall itself oﬀ from ethics’ (p. 53).
Plumwood traces a continuous line between such remoteness from
nature and a similar remoteness the male elite established between themselves
and women, slaves and colonized others, who were deemed lacking
in human reason, and thus part of exploitable nature. She writes:
Many regimes, and many oppressions have since lent their colour to
this hegemonic imaginary of reason and nature. In patriarchal
Conty 3
thought, men represent reason and rightfully control the world as
well as the dangerous emotionality, irrationality and reproductivity
of women, who are ‘closer to nature’. In the colonizing, racial
supremacist version, it is inferior and ‘barbarian’ others who are
closer to nature, an earlier and more primitive stage of our own
rational civilization, who receive only beneﬁts when more advanced
masters of reason, the colonisers, come to take away their land to
put it to proper, rational use. (p. 21)
It thus becomes impossible to separate anthropocentrism from other
problematic centrisms, such as androcentrism, ethnocentrism and eurocentrism.
All of these centrisms use a binary structure to exclude human
and non-human others by isolating values to the realm of human reason
alone. If such a model was useful for the Western conquest of the rest of
the world and its expropriation of peoples and resources to produce what
sociologist Jason Moore calls ‘Cheap Nature’ (low-cost food, laborpower,
energy, and raw materials) (Moore, 2015: 53), in the age of the
Anthropocene it is revealing itself to be nothing less than suicidal.
But in our postcolonial and emancipatory age, the tables have turned,
and ‘new materialisms’ (see Conty, 2018) and ‘new animisms’
(Halbmayer, 2012: 9) are gaining recognition as we do our best to repress
and unlearn Cartesian dualities in order to heal our ailing planet.
Anthropologist Viveiros de Castro expresses this reversal well:
But now, in these poststructuralist, ecologically-minded, animalrights-concerned
times, everything has changed . . . Instead of
having to prove that they are humans because they distinguish
themselves from animals, we now have to recognize how inhuman
we are for opposing humans to animals in a way they
never did: for them nature and culture are part of the same sociocosmic
ﬁeld. Not only would Amerindians put a wide berth between
themselves and the great Cartesian divide, which separated humanity
from animality, but their views anticipate the fundamental lessons
of ecology which we are only now in a position to assimilate . . .
Formerly, it had been necessary to combat the assimilation of the
savage mind to narcissistic animism, the infantile stage of naturalism
. . . now, as we have seen, animism is attributed once more to
savages, but this time it is proclaimed . . . as the correct (or at least
‘valid’) recognition of the universal admixture of subjects and
objects, humans and nonhumans, to which we modern Westerners
have been blind, because of our foolish, nay, sinful habit of thinking
in dichotomies. (Viveiros de Castro, 2015: 240–1)
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
Latour himself is guilty of such a modernist bias in his book Facing
Gaia (2013), where he insinuates that indigenous populations do not
really respect nature, but rather their small size and inability to use technology
to manipulate matter gives the impression of ecological respect
that would better be understood as redundancy in terms of numbers and
power. Latour writes:
Maybe, if only we could be sure that what passes for a respect for
the earth is not due to their small numbers and to the relative weakness
of their technology. None of those so called ‘traditional’
people, the wisdom of which we often admire, is prepared to scale
up their ways of life to the size of the giant technical metropolises in
which are now corralled more than half of the human race. (p. 128)
But there are 370 million indigenous people alive today and they neither
face the threat of disappearing due to modernization nor, when
given the chance, have they chosen to ‘scale up their ways’ in mimickry
of ‘technical metropolises’. Anthropologist John Bodley makes clear that
Westerners have become so ethnocentric and arrogant that they cannot
imagine another culture having value for its members, and readily
assume that such members desire Western modernization. But, if we
were to ask the question: ‘How do autonomous tribal peoples feel
about becoming participants in the progress of commercial civilization?’,
we would have to acknowledge that tribal peoples:
would rather pursue their own form of the good life undisturbed . . .
Indeed, it can perhaps be assumed that people in any autonomous,
self-reliant culture would prefer to be left alone. Left to their own
devices, tribal peoples are unlikely to volunteer for civilization or
acculturation. [Instead], acculturation has always been a matter of
conquest . . . refugees from the foundering groups may adopt the
standards of the more potent society in order to survive as individuals.
But these are conscripts of civilization, not volunteers.
(Bodley, 2014: 33–4)
Although today anthropologists speak of ‘indigenous modernities’ to
reﬂect the fact that indigenous communities have adapted to modern
tools, nation state sovereignty and capitalist economies in multifaceted
ways, they continue to reject modern capitalist resource extraction and
the placing of proﬁt over shared kinship values intrinsic to animism. As
anthropologist Dan Rosengren explains:
Indigenous people have not succumbed to the temptations of the
West; nor have they surrendered to the bliss of development and the
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capitalist market system that Westerners once thought inevitable . . .
On the contrary, they have now, at the beginning of the new millennium,
achieved a position from which they challenge the powers
and ‘truths’ of the conquerors not as minorities or locals or any
other special interest group but as indigenous people . . . From the
refusal to accept the dictates of modern Western hegemony emerge
visions of the world and its future that are not only in opposition to
Western modernity but that also present alternatives that become
increasingly attractive as the consequences of Western modernity
becomes evident. (Rosengren, 2018: 98–9)
Now that we have become aware that the problems of overconsumption,
accumulation, commodiﬁcation and appropriation lie with technologically
advanced peoples, instead of forcing indigenous peoples to
modernize, we should be pressuring modern societies to reduce energy
consumption, de-grow their economies and, perhaps even, learn to reinhabit
localities and re-form communities. Danowski and Viveiros de
Castro (2017: 95–96) write:
It seems to us that Latour fails to consider the possibility that the
generally small populations and ‘relatively weak’ technologies of
indigenous peoples and so many other sociopolitical minorities of
the earth could become a crucial advantage and resource in a postcatastrophic
time, or, if one wishes, in a permanently diminished
human world. Our author does not seem prepared, himself, to
accept the highly likely possibility that we – the people of the (capitalist)
Core, the overweight, mediatically controlled, psychopharmacologically
stabilized automata of technologically ‘advanced’
societies that are highly dependent on a monumental consumption
(or rather, waste) of energy – that we, when the chips are down,
might be the ones who will have to scale down our precious ways of
living. As a matter of fact, if someone needs ‘to be prepared’ for
something, that someone is us, the ones who are crowded together
in ‘giant technical metropolises’.
Since we now know that the West has never been modern, and no
society has ever been primitive, anthropology can cease to function
according to the illusory dichotomies of modernity and accept its new
mission, ‘that of being the theory-practice of the permanent decolonization
of thought’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2009: 4).
The irony of such a return of the repressed has not been lost on
anthropologist Alf Hornborg, when he asks ‘how shall we be able to
reintroduce morality into our dealings with our non-human
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
environment, now that we have invested centuries of training and discourse
into convincing ourselves that Nature lays beyond the reach of
moral concerns?’ (Hornborg, 2013: 30). Might such a reintroduction of
morality entail a ‘return’ of sorts to pre-modern ways of thinking? If the
West has always denied reciprocity and kinship with the natural world, is
adopting such animistic views and attributing agency to the entire ecosphere
feasible? If the illusory nature of the divide between nature and
culture has ﬁnally been brought to light, and nature can no longer be
made cheap, indigenous populations who never adhered to this divide in
the ﬁrst place can inspire an ontology not founded in human exceptionalism.
Replacing the asymmetrical relation between nature and culture
currently in place with a symmetrical one will require enlarging the scope
of our values and thus of culture to the entire bio-sphere, and it will also
require understanding the human species as an interdependent part of
evolutionary natural processes. If Cartesian dualism has thus become
implausible, it is perhaps time we sought to understand animism both
anthropologically in terms of the dominant way of life of indigenous
peoples and philosophically in terms of a new conceptual paradigm for
the Anthropocene.4
After using philosopher Bruno Latour’s understanding
of modernity as a general framework for a re-evaluation of animism
in the introduction, Section II will develop anthropologist Viveiros de
Castro’s interpretation of perspectivism to describe the ontological presuppositions
of indigenous animist societies, while Section III will elucidate
philosopher Fe´ lix Guattari’s notion of ‘machinic animism’ as a new
ideology for the Anthropocene.
II Indigenous Animism
As a conceptual system, animism entails four interrelated ideas: personhood,
relationality, location and ontological boundary crossing. Graham
Harvey (2006: xi) deﬁnes animism as the belief ‘that the world is full of
persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in
relationship to others’. When constituted in terms of relationality, personhood
is no longer the exclusive property of human beings. All animals
are persons, meaning they all share consciousness and soul. In the terms
of anthropologist Viveiros de Castro, to be a person ‘is to be conscious
and self-conscious, to act intentionally, with agency, and to communicate
intelligently and deliberately’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2017: 187). Thus
Descartes’ narcissistic motto, ‘I think therefore I am’, needs to be
replaced in animistic cultures by the far more inclusive motto, ‘it
exists, therefore it thinks’ (Viveiros de Castro, 2015: 187). All material
forms are ensouled, and thus, in the words of Viveiros de Castro, ‘subjectivity
is not an exclusively human property, but the basis of the real’
(cited in Melitopoulos and Lazzarato, 2012: 48).
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According to this ﬁrst characteristic, personhood is redistributed from
the exclusively human domain to the entire bio-sphere (see Mbembe,
2017). Persons, bears and koalas, ants and nematodes all have their
own complex cultures because nature is culture all the way down.
Indeed, the idea of nature does not exist amongst indigenous peoples,
for the entire environment is ﬁlled with cultural meanings invested in it
by indigenous tribes. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose explains as
follows:
The evidence of life in action shows us that other beings have and
follow their own ways. They have their own foods, foraging methods,
forms of sociality and seasonality; they have their own languages
and their own ceremonies. According to one Elder: ‘birds
got ceremony of their own – brolga, turkey, crow, hawk, white and
black cockatoo – all got ceremony, women’s side, men’s side . . .
everything. (Bird Rose, 2013: 100)
Since all animals testify to personhood, what diﬀers is embodiment,
since diﬀerent shapes, sizes, limbs and sensory organs embody consciousness
or soulhood in diﬀerent ways. Rather than supporting the mind/
body dualism of modernity, such an animist attribution of subjectivity to
all agents transforms the meaning of immanence, for ‘subjectivity’ and
‘thinking’ are not transcendent categories in animism but rather inhere in
material bodies that transversally communicate with each other and coconstitute
each other. As such, all entities, not just humans, have purposive
agency and express themselves and, through enunciating, assemble
and dissemble subjectivities and collectivities. Learning to recognize
persons can thus cultivate an appreciation for the ways they reveal themselves
and communicate with us but can also, according to anthropologists
Danny Naveh and Nurit Bird-David, ‘counteract the current
destructive tendency to understand and engage with things/persons
according to a utilitarian understanding’ (Naveh and Bird-David,
2014: 37).
In an ironic twist to Anthropocene discourse, Viveiros de Castro has
taken the study of animism a step further in his research on Amazonian
tribes, when he claims that not only are all living beings subjects, but they
are human subjects.5
Since being human entails placing oneself at the
centre of the world and interpreting the world in terms of one’s own
bodily form and needs, all animals take themselves to be human. For
the jaguar, as the Runa people put it, blood is manioc beer (Kohn, 2013:
27). It is thus not nature that all entities share but rather humanity as the
ability to interpret the world from a subjective point of view, for, as
Viveiro de Castro puts it, ‘the basis of humans and non-humans is
humanity’ (cited in Melitopoulos and Lazzarato, 2012: 48). Describing
the Raramuri peoples in the Eastern Sierra Madres of Chihuahua,
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
Mexico, indigenous scholar Enrique Salmon calls this shared humanity ‘a
kinship ecology’, when all the natural elements of an ecosystem are treated
as kin. He explains as follows:
In a previous world, people were part plant. When the Raramuri
emerged into this world, many of those plants followed. They live
today as humans of a diﬀerent form. Peyote, datura, maize, morning
glory, brazilwood, coyotes, crows, bears, and deer are all humans.
Raramuri feel related to these life-forms much as Euroamericans feel
related to cousins and siblings (Levi 1993). (Salmon, 2000: 1328–9)
It is this humanity as common ground that allows for a shared politics,
because in enunciating, in expressing its humanity, each human is able to
think itself beyond the boundary of the unitary and enclosed self of the
Western tradition into a shared world. To refuse ‘to see as’ is thus a
refutation of humanity, for it is precisely this ability that is humanity’s
deﬁning trait. Viveiros de Castro writes:
Typically, in normal conditions, humans see humans as humans,
animals as animals and spirits (if they see them) as spirits; however
animals (predators) and spirits see humans as animals (as prey) to
the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as
animals (predators). By the same token, animals and spirits see
themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become)
anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages
and they experience their own habits and characteristics in the
form of culture – they see their food as human food (jaguars see
blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as
grilled ﬁsh etc.), they see their bodily attributes (fur, feathers, claws,
beaks etc.) as body decorations or cultural instruments, they see the
social system as organized in the same way as human institutions
are (with chiefs, shamans, ceremonies, exogamous moieties etc.).
(cited in Harvey, 2005: 470)
In such a worldview, humanity is both universal and subjective, since
each species sees itself as the centre of the world and other species cannot
occupy the deictic position of the ‘I’. Yet each species knows that other
species see themselves in a similar way, and thus all inter-relations are political,
or function as what philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (2002:
249) calls a ‘cosmopolitics’. Politics cannot be limited to human beings as
Plato’s philosophy has bequeathed to us, but rather Stengers writes:
should entertain the problematic togetherness of the many concrete,
heterogeneous, enduring shapes of value . . . that compose actuality,
Conty 9
thus including beings as disparate as ‘neutrinos’ (a part of the physicist’s
reality) and ancestors (a part of reality for those whose traditions
have taught them to communicate with the dead). (p. 249)
Because human persons see peccaries as game, whilst for peccaries
humans are dangerous predators, just as jaguars see human persons as
game, and humans see jaguars as dangerous predators, all of these different
perspectives must be taken into account when you live in a world
that includes multiple desires and multiple intentions, multiple cultures
and multiple modes of communication. ‘It thus follows that every transspeciﬁc
interaction in Amerindian worlds is an international intrigue, a
diplomatic negotiation, or a war operation that must be undertaken with
maximum circumspection: cosmopolitics’ (Danowski and Viveiros de
Castro, 2017: 70–71).
For animists, such persons are deﬁned relationally, our second trait,
because they share their world with many other persons with whom they
enter into complex forms of communication. Such a relational ontology
entails that communication is always what Le´ vy-Bruhl called ‘participation’.
In a polis understood in a participatory framework, persons can
never be understood in isolation and language is always dialogic. Because
personhood is not understood in terms of ontological intrinsic essences,
such relationality is essential for the constitution of a person.6
As anthropologist
Philippe Descola explains in reference to indigenous animist
tribes in South America, ‘the entities of which our universe is made
have a meaning and identity solely through the relations that constitute
them as such’ (Descola and Palsson, 1996: 99). In a relational ontology,
there is no way to justify intrinsic diﬀerences between nature and culture,
us and them, since neither element has an intrinsic identity outside of its
relation to alterity. In the words of anthropologist Anna Tsing, ‘Human
nature is an interspecies relationship’ (Tsing, 2012: 144).
Persons exist only through their relations, because they are all dependent
upon a shared ecosystem, or location, our third trait, that grounds
and gives meaning to their communication. So all persons are relational,
and all relations are situated, and the location determines the communication
and thus the persons that depend upon it. A relational ontology is
possible only because beings are immersed in speciﬁc and irreplaceable
localities that allow speciﬁc beings, cultures and ecosystems to thrive.
Harvey (2005: 186) explains how these concepts work together as follows:
Animists’ contributions to ecological thinking and acting are rooted
in the ﬁrm insistence that not only is all life inescapably located and
related, but also that the attempt to escape is at the root of much
that is wrong with the world today. Animism’s alternative promise
is a celebratory engagement of embodied persons with a personal
and sensual world.
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
Finally, the ability to cross ontological boundaries entails the ability to
‘adopt the perspective of nonhuman subjectivities’ in order to understand
how they conceive of themselves as the centre of their own worlds. This
ability, which is essential for empathy, and is wired into many animals
via mirror neurons, allows a person to feel as, and think as, another.
From the perspective of neurobiology, sharing intentional states is made
possible because exactly the same neurons are activated in our brains
when another person performs an action in front of us as when we perform
the action ourselves (we have all experienced the spontaneous
impulse to laugh when surrounded by laughter, and to sneeze when
others sneeze). Political representation, as well as other forms of imaginative
transference, develop out of this biological predisposition, making
relationality constitutive of being human. ‘Men, as social beings, live in a
world that is humming with empathy, such that they permanently adopt,
almost involuntarily, the perspective of others’ (Breithaupt, 2009: 8).7
Anthropologist Maurice Bloch is thus correct when he claims that ‘the
ability to ‘‘read’’ the mind of others’ and thus to share intentionality is a
biological trait of the human species correlated with the ﬁring of mirror
neurons in the F5 cortex, but he is wrong to isolate this capacity to the
human species alone (Bloch, 2013). The sharing of intentionality with
non-human others demonstrated in animist cultures has been widely
corroborated by the science of ethology and the study of mirror neurons
in other species (for animal cognition, see Bekoﬀ et al., 2002, and the
work on mirror neurons in chimpanzees and other apes, in Rizzolatti and
Sinigaglia, 2008). John Zerzan (2012: 14–15) relates anthropologist Van
der Post’s astonishment when studying the bushmen in the Kalahari
desert, who
seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lion,
an antelope, a steenbuck, a lizard, a striped mouse, mantis, baobab
tree, yellow-crested cobra or starry-eyed amaryllis, to mention only
a few of the brilliant multitudes through which they moved.
Although such a capacity is available to all beings to diﬀerent degrees,
those persons who master this ability to cross ontological boundaries are
called shamans, the ‘active interlocutors in transspeciﬁc dialogues’
(Viveiros de Castro, 2005: 150).
Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017: 94) call such indigenous animists
terrans and they claim that no matter how numerous (they cite 370
million indigenous peoples across 70 nations), such terrans will never
replace the moderns, because they will never form a majority and
become ‘responsible for a hegemonic ideology that could control peoples’.
That is not their role. Yet such peoples can launch what they call,
citing Deleuze and Guattari, a ‘resistance to the present’ and create ‘ ‘‘a
new earth,’’ the world to come’ (p. 95). Danowski and Viveiros de Castro
Conty 11
understand such a project of ‘re-becoming indigenous’ (p. 122) as one of
‘uncivilization’, characterized by ‘a technology of slowing down, a diseconomy
no longer mesmerized by the hallucination of continuous
growth, a cultural insurrection (if the expression may be pardoned)
against the zombieﬁcation of the citizen–consumer’ (pp. 97–8). Rather
than testifying to backwardness, such a re-becoming indigenous delineates
the possible ‘subsistence of the future’ (p. 123). Only such a new
people can create a new world from the ruins we will have left them.
III Machinic Animism
What might it mean then, for us moderns, to re-become indigenous and
become ‘uncivilized’? Should we prepare darts for our blowguns and set
up camp in a yurt or earthship in abandoned industrial zones or join the
Zones a` De´ fendre in France or the Earth Liberation Army elsewhere?
This is certainly one way. But Westerners are also re-becoming indigenous
in more subtle ways. If Westerners attribute personhood to their
domestic animals, they must learn to attribute personhood to other
living organisms as well. Because many moderns lack phenomenological
evidence of consciousness and agency in other animals due to their isolation
from natural ecosystems, they may require scientiﬁc conﬁrmation
of the animist recognition of other animals as intentional, purposive
agents. Such evidence is now readily available. Developments in ethology,
cognitive science and behavioral psychology demonstrate the intelligence,
tool-use, consciousness and self-consciousness of many other
animals (De Waal; Bekoﬀ; Korsgaard; Oliver; Corbey; Godfrey-Smith;
Coppens; Narby). Studies have been published showing consciousness
(Seth et al., 2005) and ‘core emotions’ (Panksepp, 2005) to be intrinsic
to all mammals equipped with a thalamo-cortico complex, and recognizing
amniotes and octopi as capable of simulation and expecting consequences
has enlarged the scope of conscious beings from mammals to all
amniotes (Cabanac et al., 2009) and cephalopods (Merker, 2005;
Edelman et al., 2009).
For example, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, published
by Cambridge University in 2012, indicates that:
the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in
possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.
Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many
other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological
substrates.8
This study was followed in 2017 by an INRA report on ‘Animal
Consciousness’ published by 16 scientists, which concludes that:
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
Livestock species, such as poultry, pigs, and sheep, exhibit cognitive
behaviours that seem to imply levels and contents of consciousness
that until recently were considered exclusive to humans and to some
primates. That is even more the case for ﬁsh and invertebrates that
until recently were not even considered as sentient . . . It is thus
likely that what matters to animals is rather similar to what matters
to humans. We believe that human sentience is the capacity to suﬀer
and to feel empathy for the suﬀering of others, and deserves ethical
recognition . . . Therefore, the same should apply to non-human
beings . . .9
Similarly, a plethora of books on plant intelligence are now widely
available, in books with titles such as Plants as Persons, Plant Thinking,
The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, The Language of Plants, The
Imagination of Plants, The Hidden Life of Trees, How Forests Think, all
of which point to the ‘repression of the living’ typical of Western philosophy
and science (Coccia, 2018: 24). Botanist Mathew Hall gives the
following reasons for the moral consideration of plants:
Close observation of plant life-history demonstrates that plants are
communicative, relational beings — beings that inﬂuence and are
inﬂuenced by their environment. They also reveal that plants have
their own purposes, intricately connected with ﬁnding food and
producing oﬀspring. Like other living beings, plants attempt to
maintain their own integrity in changing environmental conditions.
Plants display intelligent behavior in order to maximize both their
growth and the production of oﬀspring. (Hall, 2011: 158)
This moral inclusion of plants was conﬁrmed by the Federal Ethics
Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH), when it published a
scientiﬁc study in 2008 ascertaining that humans do not have ‘unrestricted
power over plants. We may not use them just as we please’,
not only because ‘we may inﬂuence or even destroy other players of
the natural world, and so alter their relationships’, but also because
‘individual plants have an inherent worth’.10
Though Western culture is still locked inside an identity myth founded
in intrinsic essential qualities, much science has gone into undermining
such a view and showing, whether in physics (Einstein, Prigogine, Bohm,
McDaniel, Jeans, Sherrington, Wright, Rensch, Walker, Cochran,
Bohm, Dyson, Rohm and Hameroﬀ), biology (Margulis, Midgley,
Clarke, Kauﬀman, Agar, De Quincey), or politics (Sandel, Walzer,
MacIntyre and Taylor), that humans and all other life-forms are relational,
their identities dependent upon the many agencies external to
them. If most Westerners live in metropolises and virtual worlds that
Conty 13
alienate them from the ecosystems that sustain them, the importance of
locality is the subject of a good deal of recent research, and many local
movements are organizing themselves to defend the habitus and local
solidarity over and against international corporations and states that
seek shareholder or national proﬁts over democratic cooperation and
ecological renewal. Indeed, indigenous sustainability methods for biodiversity
preservation have been introduced and discussed by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as
Assessment Reports and the Convention on Biological Diversity
(CBD) (see Mazzochi, 2020: 3). Many scholars have also been seeking
to include Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in their academic
research and promote indigenous sustainable practices such as traditional
burning techniques, rotation of hunting areas, shifting cultivation
and terrace farming (see, for instance, Cajete, 2000; Haila, 2000;
Mazzochi, 2020; McGregor, 2004; Pierotti and Wildcat, 2000; Salmon,
2000; Sundberg, 2014).
As the natural sciences seek to prove animist presuppositions scientifically,
and moderns come to realize that sentience, consciousness and
culture are intrinsic to all of life, perhaps an animist ontology will
become the new normal. But, in order for this to happen, the values of
solidarity and kinship will need to replace economic competition and
consumer satisfaction as the sole values of modern culture. In his book
The Three Ecologies (2000), philosopher and psychoanalyst Fe´ lix
Guattari expresses concern over this lack of solidarity in modern culture,
and looks to animist cultures in order to cultivate kinship and develop a
‘transversal’ response he calls ecosophy.11
In a passage written in 1989
that has come to sound almost eerie, he wrote:
Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in
order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the
mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference,
we must learn to think ‘transversally.’ Just as monstrous
and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television
screens are populated, saturated, by degenerate images and statements.
In the ﬁeld of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are
permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking
over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City . . . How do we
regain control of such an auto-destructive and potentially catastrophic
situation? . . . It is not only species that are going
extinct but the words, phrases and gestures of human solidarity.
(2000: 43–4)
Because indigenous peoples never objectiﬁed the non-human world,
preferring to attribute subjectivity universally to all entities in order to
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
develop reciprocal and interdependent relations, Guattari (2000: 48) asks
us to ‘pass through animist thought’ in order to develop a politics of
nature in which subjectivation, and thus the political, inheres in all
matter. By replacing behaviour with assemblage (agencement),12
and conscious
subjectivity with pre-conscious subjectivation, the world is constantly
opening itself up to being politically reconﬁgured by human and
non-human subjects in a shared world. Attributing spirit to all beings,
like a Mexican curandero or a Bororo,13
could help us, Guattari claims,
to develop the solidarity that is so sorely lacking in the Anthropocene.
Rather than intrinsic essences and exclusive rationality, subjectivity is
ﬂuid, travelling from body to body by means of enunciation, or what
Guattari called an a-signifying semiotics, whether gestural, aesthetic or
linguistic. It is only when subjectivity is imprisoned within a dominant
human form in order to further the ends of economic competition and
state power that communication ceases and subjects lose their singularity
and can no longer be transformed by their encounters with other subjects.
‘We must ward oﬀ’, Guattari (2000: 68) tells us, ‘by every means
possible, the entropic rise of a dominant subjectivity. Rather than
remaining subject, in perpetuity, to the seductive eﬃciency of economic
competition, we must reappropriate Universes of value.’
Understood in this light, we might surmise that modernity represents
precisely such an entropic dominant subjectivity, caused by the rapid
extermination of subjectivation as the possibility of becoming other
and communicating otherwise. If such a reconsideration of humanity is
to be taken seriously today, it will require the development of a transversal
ecosophy, which is able to take into account the ways natures and
cultures coincide and communicate, the many ways subjects become
other to themselves through ontological trespassing. Guattari calls
‘machinic animism’ the ability of souls to reassemble and become other
to themselves, and he sees the return of pre-Columbian polyvocal subjectivities
as a ﬁtting reversal of capitalist globalized unicity. He writes:
And now it is Capital that is starting to shatter into animist and
machinic polyvocity. Would it not be a fabulous reversal if the old
aboriginal African subjectivities pre-Columbus became the ultimate
recourse for the subjective reappropriation of machinic self-reference?
These same Negroes, these same Indians, the same Oceanians
many of whose ancestors chose death rather than submission to the
ideals of power, slavery and the exchangism of Christianity and then
capitalism? (Guattari, 2012: 15)
In this sense, ‘machinic animism’ can help us see the many ways that
even today, and even in the West, we can reassemble our identities and
cross ontological boundaries in order to ‘see as another’ today. Though
we live in a world where the inﬂuence of the capitalist utilitarian system
Conty 15
has meant that students choose to study business instead of anthropology,
engineering instead of philosophy, the humanistic disciplines are
nonetheless built upon the capacity to ‘see as other’. Indeed, not only
theatre but reading itself, in the words of philosopher Fre´ de´ ric Lordon
(2016), ‘is to leave the self’. We can practise such a transference through
literature, for instance, and imagine ourselves as men or women, beggars
or emperors, Maggie Tulliver or the Princesse de Cle` ves.14
In this
sense, studying the humanities can foster ontological boundary crossings
similar to animistic traditions. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has
claimed that:
The questions of justice that follow from climate-change science
require us to possess an ability that only the humanities can
foster: the ability to see something from another person’s point of
view. The ability, in other words, ‘to imagine sympathetically the
predicament of another person’. (Chakrabarty, 2016: 378)
For Chakrabarty, a solution to the Anthropocene depends upon the
ability to enter other embodiments and see the world from their perspective,
an ability very similar to the ontological boundary crossing of
animism.
We might indeed claim with novelist JM Coetzee that the humanities
foster the inclusion of all other beings within humanity, just as indigenous
animism does, and that such an inclusion is indeed constitutive of
what it means to be human. Although his book The Lives of Animals
(1999) does not directly address the Anthropocene, Coetzee imagines a
world where non-human forms of life have been genetically and biologically
re-engineered to serve human ends, and where such a loss of other
ways of being in the world incurs a loss of humanity, because ‘the sympathetic
imagination’ is dulled. To become human, for Coetzee, we must
be able to ‘think ourselves into the being of another’, to be more than
one. Thinking, that is to say, is always thinking alterity, and thus always
about sharing a world. And if we can think ourselves into the ﬁctional
characters of literature, Coetzee’s protagonist Elizabeth Costello claims
that we can think our way:
into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being
with whom [we] share the substrate of life . . . There are people who
have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are
people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call
them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but
choose not to exercise it. (p. 35).
Sympathetic imagination, rather than rational calculation, is required
to see things from the point of view of a jaguar, a ﬂying ant, or a forest.
16 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
Indeed, such a capacity for ontological boundary crossing may very
well be essential to politics as well. If such ‘thinking as’ is essential to
thinking the polis and organizing ways of living together that can fulﬁl
the human potential, it is because without the ability to put oneself in the
place of the other, to see things from his or her perspective, one cannot
develop moral judgements in a plural world of competing worldviews. In
order to adopt universal norms that refer to and represent all persons
equally, each normative concept must be considered from the points of
view of all persons, irrespective of gender, ethnos, religious aﬃliation,
political aﬃliation or even species. This ability to consider multiple
points of view, to put ourselves in the place of others, is thus a requirement
in order to sustain democratic governance. It is central in philosopher
John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, by means of which a citizen is to
apply the epoche´ to his or her own experience and status in order to
imagine himself or herself in the place of others. And it is essential to
what philosopher Hannah Arendt (2006[1977]: 241) calls representation,
by which she means:
making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent
. . . The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I
am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I
would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be
my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my ﬁnal
conclusions.
For Arendt, because ‘political thought is representative’ through and
through, such feeling and thinking in the place of others constitutes the
very meaning of politics.
If politics has been considered a uniquely human sphere in Western
modernity, this is due to the hegemony of symbolic communication. In
order to develop a more inclusive cosmopolitics, we will need to master
other semiotic systems, particularly biosemiotics (including zoosemiotics
and phytosemiotics). If icons and indices are signs shared by all animals,
and if biology itself can be interpreted as a semiotic system (cells and the
genetic code are semiotic signs for Kalevi et al., 2011, and Barbieri,
2008), acknowledging such a biosemiotics will allow a cosmopolitics to
include all social relations, not only those between human beings privileged
by Arendt. If we have been witnessing the slow and unﬁnished
attempts to include other human genders and ethnicities in political representation,
relations with non-human beings, such as elephants, mountains
and rivers, have been excluded from the political sphere, and
relegated to science (which objectiﬁes them) or to folklore, tourism, or
ecology. Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena addresses this political
reductionism in her remarkable book on the Runa shaman Nazario’s
Conty 17
attempts to have his people’s relationship with the mountain Ausangate
recognized by the Peruvian state. She writes:
Analogous to dominant science, which does not allow its objects to
speak, hegemonic politics tells its subjects what they can bring into
politics and what should be left to scientists, magicians, priests, or
healers – or, as I have been arguing, left to dwell in the shadows of
politics. Because mountains cannot be brought to politics (other
than through science), Nazario’s partnership with Ausangate is all
but folklore, beliefs that belong to another ‘culture,’ that can be
happily commodiﬁed as tourist attraction, but in no case can it be
considered in politics. This exclusion is not just racism; it expresses
the consensual agreement foundational to politics. The exclusions
that result from it are disabled from their translation as political
disagreement because they do not count – at all. (De la Cadena,
2010: 359)
Though Bruno Latour has called for the enlargement of democracy to
include non-human others, he speciﬁed that these others required scientists
to speak for them, thereby retaining the objectiﬁcation of nature and
the limitations of its potential political claims. If relations with nonhuman
others are to be represented politically, all interlocutors
(including Rosario and Ausangate) must be represented. For Rosario,
blowing up Ausangate to ﬁnd gold is wrong. The mining industry could
reply to Rosario that mountains are not sacred and that, scientiﬁcally
speaking, they are made of rocks, which have no sentience, and therefore
are worth next to nothing as compared to the gold. But if Rosario were
to retort that the Vatican is also nothing but a pile of dead stones, the
modern would quickly retort that, indeed, to quote Viveiros de Castro
(2019)’s brilliant example:
the Vatican is made of stone, but it has a sacred value, in other
words, it is not just stones. And the indigenous tribe would reply, it
is the same for us at home, the mountain is made of stone, but it is
not just stone.
Although the value of the Vatican is not in the stones, destroying the
stones would nonetheless also destroy its value. And in the same way, the
sacrality of Ausangate does not lie in the individual stones, yet destroying
these stones would indeed breach the sacrality of the human–mountain
relation. Destroying the mountain also destroys a culture and a way of
life. By shifting the focus away from the scientiﬁc truth and toward the
pragmatic concern that giving sacrality to the mountain is a way of
protecting the mountain and the cultures it enables, the truth becomes
18 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
a secondary attribute of justice and ﬂourishing. Such a cosmopolitics can
be a powerful tool in decolonizing not only anthropology but also the
natural sciences.
Now that the climate crisis has brought ecological concerns to centre
stage, the extraordinary eco-literacy of indigenous animists has led ethnologist
Thomas Karl Alberts to speak of an ‘indigenist-environmentalist
alliance’ (Alberts, 2015: 131).15
If ‘land is synonymous with the very life
of indigenous populations’, according to the 1500-page UN study of
indigenous peoples from 35 diﬀerent communities compiled by Jose´
Martinez Cobo (UNCHR, 1983b: paragraphs 50; 56; 73; pp. 196–7,
cited in Alberts, 2015: 102–3, 205), the destruction of their homelands
by mining and logging corporations has led them to organize to protect
their own lands, but also to ﬁght more generally against climate change
and environmental destruction. Speaking at the First Congress of South
American Indian Movements in Cuzco in 1980, Julio Cardun˜ o, a
Mexican Indian leader, made this struggle quite clear. He said:
Perhaps what most unites us is the defense of our land. The land has
never been merchandise for us, as it is with capitalism, but it is the
support for our cultural universe . . . There can be no economic
interest superior to the necessity of preserving the ecosystem; we
do not want a bonanza today at the cost of a desolate future.
(cited in Bodley, 2014: 192)
Similarly, Yanomami Shaman Davi Kopenawa, known as ‘the Dalaı¨
Lama of the rainforest’, was asked to address the UN in 1992, where he
told moderns:
Stop the destruction, stop taking minerals from under the ground,
and stop building roads through forests. Our word is to protect
nature, the wind, the mountains, the forest, the animals, and this
is what we want to teach you. The leaders of the rich, industrialized
world think that they are the owners of the world. But the shaboris
[shamans] are the ones that have true knowledge. They are the real
First World. And if their knowledge is destroyed, then the white
people too will die. It will be the end of the world. This is what we
want to avoid. (Davi Kopenawa, cited in Alberts, 2015: 154)
Such indigenous struggles for ecological sustainability led to 14 indigenous
organizations and 24 ONGs signing the Indigenous and
Environmentalist Alliance for an Amazon for Humanity in 1980, and
subsequently forming the Alliance for the Environment, a network of
organizations struggling to protect all the living beings of the Amazon
basin (Alberts, 2015: 151–2). More recently, the Tebtebba Foundation in
Conty 19
the Phillipines, as well as Indigenous Partnership on Climate Change and
Forests, and Indigenous Peoples Global Network on Climate Change
and Sustainable Development (IPCCSD), have been amongst the largest
ecological organizations in the world, operating in 16 countries.
Such work has been taken up in the ﬁeld of the law in ‘indigenous
governance systems’ as well as ‘Earth jurisprudence’ and ‘wild law’
(Cormac Cullinan), which adhere to laws where ‘the Earth itself is the
source of law’ (Hosken, 2011: 25– 6, cited in Alberts, 2015: 136). Such a
non-anthropocentric legal basis has enabled animist communities to give
legal personhood to non-human entities such as rivers (New Zealand’s
Whanganui river, India’s Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the Vilcabamba
river in Ecuador, as well as the Atrato and Amazon rivers in Colombia).
In these cases, the rivers were indeed allowed to defend themselves in
court, with the help of ‘negotiators’ or ‘legal guardians’, who were in all
cases interlocutors and not Western scientists. In the case of the
Whanganui river, its negotiator, Gerrard Albert, defended the river as
an ancestor:
we consider the river an ancestor and always have . . . treating the
river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as an indivisible
whole, instead of the traditional model for the last 100 years
of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management.
(Roy, 2017)
The Vilcabamba river defended itself as plaintiﬀ, with the help of legal
guardians Richard Frederick Wheeler and Eleanor Geer Huddle, calling
for its own right to ‘exist’ and to ‘maintain itself’ over and against the
Loja government, which wanted to build a highway that would interfere
with the river’s ﬂow. The river won. Ecuador decided to recognize the
intrinsic value of its ecosystem legally in its constitution in 2008, establishing
in article 255 the principles of ‘harmony with nature, defense of
biodiversity and the prohibition of private appropriation for use and
exclusive exploitation of plants, animals, microorganisms, and any
living matter’ (cited in Avelar, 2013: 270). Bolivia then similarly passed
the Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (Law of the Rights of Mother
Earth) in 2010. These examples reveal the political implications of ontological
boundary crossing, which will need to both stretch and deconstruct
legal categories.
Rosario can think with the Ausangate mountain, just as the Maori can
think with the Whanganui river, and the Runa can think with the forest
(Kohn, 2013). It is this ability to ‘think with’ that allows us to ‘live with’
rather than over and against, the natural world. In a world ‘humming with
empathy’ (Breithaupt, 2009: 8) we can adopt the perspective of both
human and non-human persons. As part of our biological evolution and
the social nature of our species, empathic ‘thinking with and as another’
20 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
can explain our capacity for political representation and help us to learn
‘appropriate etiquette and protocol’ from animists (Harvey, 2006: 19) in
order to open our political worlds to non-human persons and ecosystems.
Such ‘thinking as other’ will need to be explicitly cultivated in the
world of the Anthropocene and in the solutions developed to address
it. In a world where wild animals and indigenous communities are being
pushed to extinction, we may be left with no alterity to imagine at all.
This was indeed the dream of the Tyrell Corporation in the sci-ﬁ ﬁlm
Blade Runner. The Tyrell Corporation produced androids ‘more human
than human’. The ‘more human’ trait entailed precisely an utter lack of
empathy, particularly empathy toward non-human forms of life.
Philosopher James Stanescu expresses the stakes of this lack well:
These androids are completely interchangeable with humans, except
for one test. This test measures a person’s empathy, particularly
their empathy toward other animals. These replicants have
managed the feat of cutting the human away from the animal.
And this is the promise that the Tyrell Corporation is making
with their slogan, ‘More Human Than Human’: to produce a
humanity that is disconnected from the ﬁnitude of humanity’s
very real animality. (Stanescu, 2013: 144–5)
However ironic, the ‘new age of the human’ might very well herald a
world inhabited by a mono-species more human than human. Such an
android ‘more human than human’ heralds a loss of the humanity we
share with all other ‘earth beings’ (De la Cadena, 2015). To respond to
such a loss, we may need to cultivate a form of machinic animism that
would privilege solidarity over technological manipulation and put into
practice an ontological boundary crossing alongside specialized learning.
Perhaps such a revalorization, capable of incorporating the perspectives
of other thinking subjects into a shared cosmopolitics, will be capable of
providing us with the sympathetic imagination capable of making the
Anthropocene era truly human.
ORCID iD
Arianne Conty https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8751-0852
Notes
1. Now that mosquitoes are DEET resistant, and the heavens punctured by an
ozone hole, there is no nature that is not cultural. This is indeed the view of
the inventors of the term Anthropocene, climate scientists Crutzen and
Schwa¨ gerl, when they tell us to ‘remember, in this new era, nature is us’
(Crutzen and Schwa¨ gerl, 2011: http://e360.yale.edu/features/living_in_the_
anthropocene_toward_a_new_global_ethos). Similarly, Ulrich Beck (1992:
Conty 21
81) writes: ‘At the end of the twentieth century nature is society and society is
also ‘‘nature’’. Anyone who continues to speak of nature as non-society is
speaking in terms from a different century, which no longer capture our
reality’. Political scientist Elmar Altvater writes: ‘The separation of nature
and society that characterizes modern thought since Descartes has no basis in
reality – only a basis in the European rationality of world domination’
(Altvater, 2016: 149).
2. Ethnologist Charles Stepanoff writes as follows:
If, for ethnologists, animism is an ontology linked to particular cultural
contexts, from a psychological point of view, it is a fundamental
psychological disposition of our species. It is only under the eﬀects of
a long training that we are able, in modern societies, to repress, blunt
and ﬁnally forget it. (Stepanoﬀ, 2019: 49, my translation).
3. I follow Juanita Sundberg (2014: 34), who herself follows Shaw, Herman and
Dobbs, in defining the term ‘indigenous’ ‘to refer to groups with ancestral
ties/claims to particular lands prior to colonization by outside powers’ and
‘whose nations remain submerged within the states created by those powers’.
4. This idea of a ‘philosophical animism’ was inspired by philosopher Val
Plumwood:
Val Plumwood was, at the time of her death, working to articulate
just such an account of human and nonhuman sentient life that would
be defensible philosophically and that could engage dialogically with
indigenous peoples’ animism. The term she used was ‘philosophical
animism’, and in her words, this project ‘opens the door to a world in
which we can begin to negotiate life membership of an ecological community
of kindred beings’ (Plumwood 2009). (Bird Rose, 2015: 131)
5. Although Viveiros de Castro’s research has met with wide approval within
the field of anthropology, his research focus is the Amazon basin, and other
anthropologists have pointed to other animist cultures that do not always
humanize all other beings. For several examples of other ontological taxonomies,
see the articles by anthropologists Mathias Lewy and Laura Rival in
volume 29 (2012) of the journal Indiana.
6.
The mode of participation makes it impossible to conceive of beings
and things in isolation. It makes unthinkable the conception of identity
as the selfsame, just as it does the strict division of an ‘inside’ and
an ‘outside’ . . . Knowledge, therefore, is inherently dialogic, not
monologic. Knowledge is never knowledge about, but always knowledge
with, a process constituting both knower and known. (Franke,
2012: 171)
7. However promising such an engagement between philosophy and cognitive
science may be, the naturalization of consciousness should not be adopted
too readily. It is important not to reify the brain as some cognitive scientists
tend to do, essentializing it (as was done with the ‘selfish gene’) outside of its
22 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)
symbiotic relationality to the entire organism and its environment.
Furthermore, experience should not be reduced to brain function, as has
become typical of much reductionist science. Reducing experience to behavior
entails a significant loss of reality as it is actually lived.
8. See: http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
9. This study was requested by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA):
https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.2903/sp.efsa.2017.EN-1196
10. See: https://www.ekah.admin.ch/inhalte/ekah-dateien/dokumentation/pub-
likationen/e-Broschure-Wurde-Pflanze-2008.pdf
11. ‘only an ethico-political articulation which I call ecosophy between the three
ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity)
would be likely to clarify these questions’ (Guattari, 2000: 28).
12. Deleuze and Guattari (2013: 179) write: ‘But what we are saying is that the
idea of assemblage can replace the idea of behaviour, and thus with respect
to the idea of assemblage, the nature–culture distinction no longer matters.’
13. Guattari (2000) writes:
I am more inclined to propose a model of the unconscious akin to that
of a Mexican Cuandero or of a Bororo, starting with the idea that
spirits populate things, landscapes, groups, and that there are all sorts
of becomings, of haecceities everywhere and thus, a sort of objective
subjectivity, if I may, which ﬁnds itself bundled together, broken
apart, and shuﬄed at the whims of assemblages. The best unveiling
among them would be found, obviously, in archaic thought. (cited in
Melitopoulos and Lazzarato, 2012: 240)
14. And though we can never totally incarnate a raven, since humans will
always project human complexity from the perspective of the human
body, human plasticity is such that we can indeed approximate other life
forms. Magician, philosopher and shaman apprentice David Abram (2011:
251) was indeed able to join a raven in flight:
And I’m balancing, ﬂoating utterly at ease in the blue air. As though
we’re not moving but held, gentle and fast, in the cupped hands of the
sky. Stillness. Through a tangle of terrors I catch a ﬁrst sense of the
sheer joy that is ﬂight. Falling, yet perfectly safe. Floating. Floating at
the heart of the feathered thickness that is space. Aloft at the center of
the world mandala, turning it beneath us, the whole planet rolling this
way or that at the whim of our muscles.
15. Alberts (2015: 132) points out that such an alliance has replaced the ‘noble
savage’ of yore with the ‘ecological Indian’ in order to ‘articulate a critique
of anthropocentric mastery of nature’. The idealization of the ‘ecological
indian’ is just as problematic as that of the ‘noble savage’ and continues a
longstanding tradition of moderns speaking for the indigenous, but though
indigenous scholar Deborah McGregor states that this ‘boils down to
extracting knowledge from Aboriginal people’ (McGregor, 2004: 397),
things are slowly changing, and the voices of indigenous shamans and scholars
are being heard today.
Conty 23
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Arianne Conty is a continental philosopher working as Associate
Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Sharjah. Her
research is in the ﬁelds of the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of
technology, and the philosophy of religion. She is currently writing a
book looking at diﬀerent religious responses to the Anthropocene. She
has published over 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including
Environmental Values, Theory, Culture & Society, Politics, Religion &
Ideology, Techne´: Research in Philosophy and Technology, Journal of
Speculative Philosophy, Philosophy Today, South African Journal of
Philosophy, Dialegesthai, Literature & Theology and Medieval Mystical
Theology.
Conty 27