2 - Animism, conservation and immediacy

Summary

In this chapter we highlight the importance of immediacy for understanding the phenomenon framed as “animism”, elaborating on previous arguments about animist ontologies, relational epistemologies and conservation (see Bird-David 1999, 2006; Naveh 2007; Bird-David & Naveh 2008). While “animism” and related terms such as “animist” and “animic” are evidently used to refer to diverse phenomena, the primacy of immediacy derived from the relational and local nature of indigenous animisms is sometimes obscured by discussions utilizing the term as a universalizing category. In this chapter we would like to reiterate the necessity of a twofold move, like that of a knight in a chess game (Bird-David & Naveh 2008: 57–8). The first stage of the move is made in many studies of indigenous animisms. In this, the Cartesian subject/object dualism (of a world full of objects opposed to and observed by subjects) is exorcized from indigenous cosmoses “full of subjects”. Nonetheless, the second stage is rarely followed through. Studies continue to describe indigenous universes of interrelated subjects and are still tethered to a modern concern with a total universe, and to an overarching formal category, “the subject”, as a means for mapping its diversity. Instead, a full recognition of the working of relationality requires careful attention to diverse, local, specific and immediate acts of relating. Animism, as we utilize the term, is about a world full of immediate relational beings.