Art is as old as human culture. For most of the time, art was part of an exchange between humans and the cosmic order. Art was meant as a gift to nourish the fecundity of life. Art was communication with ancestral creational powers — the invocation of a poetic space from which creation entered the material realm. This paper explores art as a way of tapping into the invisible forces of reality. I argue that humans can experience these forces as aliveness (joy/desire to give) and can transmit them by poetic creation. Through art, humans have a capacity to nourish life, in parallel to how natural productivity unfolds from the unseen into the embodied domain. This capacity is a source of artistic creation. It is a crucial means to participate in a life-giving cosmos. Although the Western understanding of art is far from this attitude, art has remained the domain where aliveness is accommodated not with empirical, but with imaginational means. In the current global crisis of life, it is crucial to remember the potential of art not only to relate but to contribute to aliveness. Programs in environmental education should build on the direct perception and expressive imagination of aliveness.

Rewilding memory provides the basis for a new theoretical and practical agenda to bring greater neurological human diversity and ecological diversity into research and teaching on memory, mind and media. The article develops the concept of ‘more-than-human-memory’ to refer to the co-construction of memories between diverse humans and the environment. The article draws on research that examined a transmedia corpus of 40 neurodivergent memory works (life writing, memoirs, autobiographical art, blogs and videos). It found that memory works by autistic people consistently remember the self in terms of the co-composition of human memories through and with the media and matter of environmental memories. The article explores the ways in which some autistic people's memory works decentre human memories through deep ecological memory, conversations with vibrant objects and memories of animating energies. The research suggests that such memories ‘rewild’ or eco-neuroqueer the human-centred and normatively biased assumptions of memory, mind and media that underpin psychology, philosophy of mind, media and memory studies. It contributes a new angle to research that addresses the dialogical relationship between what Barnier and Hoskins (2018) have termed ‘memory in the mind’ and ‘memory in the wild’. It also goes beyond extended mind theory that understands human memory as enhanced and extended through non-biological tools and suggests the significance to memory of the more-than-human living world. Importantly, it highlights connections between autistic more-than-human-memories and the conceptualisation and practices associated with the more-than-human in research shaped by eco-psychology, Indigenous Studies and Environmental Humanities.

Historians have claimed that the two closely related concepts of animism and natural teleology were both decisively rejected in the Scientific Revolution. They tout Robert Boyle as an early modern warden against pre-modern animism. Discussing Avicenna, Aquinas, and Buridan, as well as Renaissance psychology, I instead suggest that teleology went through a slow and uneven process of rationalization. As Neoplatonic theology gained influence over Aristotelian natural philosophy, the meaning of animism likewise grew obscure. Boyle, as some historians have shown, exemplifies this uneven process. There is an unresolved tension between his religious convictions and the implicit animism of his empirical practice.

The recent discovery of a Late/Final Pre-Pottery Neolithic B burial of an adult and two children associated with fox bones at the site of Motza, Israel, demonstrates the broader socio-cultural perspective, and possibly continued animistic world views, of Neolithic foragers at the onset of the agricultural revolution.

This transversal and transilient thought-experiment explores the application and significance of Japanese animism for environmental education and environmental philosophy. Through the exploration of indigenous knowledge found in Japanese folklore and Japanese Buddhism, the thought-experiment offers a critique of a certain strand of contemporary fatalistic and nihilistic thinking regarding the Anthropocene. At its simplest it questions the trend toward mysticism and obfuscation in environmental education and demands a response to the environmental crisis precisely through reason and rationality. How shall this be undertaken? On one level, the hauntings of 妖怪 (Yōkai) and 幽霊 (Yūrei) in Japanese folklore shall act as a prism through which to understand the impact of the fantastical on the contemporary imagination, and on another level, I shall critique the fantastical as such to question the so-called inaccessibility of the hyperobject (Morton, 2014), which in the end leaves us despairingly passive and without the possibility of response. It is in the work of the Japanese philosopher 井上円了 (Inoue Enryō) and especially his defence of Western Enlightenment beliefs during Japan’s modernisation period (1868–1912) that a curious method and heuristic tool is found that may be used to address not only the problem of mystification in Japanese philosophy but also the obfuscation of the ecological object of recent Western thought. Seemingly sacrilegiously, it is through reason and at the limits of the rational that one may approach the hyperobject-in-itself, which is to say, the unfathomable as such.

Mia Couto is among the most prominent of contemporary Mozambican writers. Yet he has also enjoyed a career as an environmental biologist and ecologist, having expressed much interest in interrogating the border between what is human and not human through his scientific practice. In this essay I locate the nexus of Couto’s literary and ecological careers in his concern with recovering forms of proximity among humans, environments, and other species. Through an analysis of some of Couto’s recently translated novels, I argue that his work reconceives of the relations between humans and animals through the concept of biosemiotics, an approach attuned to languages conveyed semiotically through embodied and skillful engagement with the larger-than-human world. Couto’s work in turn grounds biosemiotics in segments of African life that find their basis in forms of animism, thus implicating the concept in the postcolonial work of cultural recuperation and decolonization.

In this article I explore different ways archaeologists can contribute to and learn from theorizing the digital world beyond the traditional functionalistic means of applying computational methods. I argue that current digital technologies can be a very constructive tool to create non-human experience and awareness. I pursue this argument by presenting ideas from a work-in-progress project experimenting with the post-human and the virtual, and by exploring significant otherness in Roman religion and the dark spots in human perception, through the analysis of an absent temple in Rome. Applying post-human philosophies and an expanded concept of virtuality beyond the digital makes it possible to change our approach to object/human/divine relations in Roman cults and how we present Roman heritage towards a post-humanist framework. Through this, digital archaeology can become one of the ways of re-examining and reinventing our ideas of the human, the past and the digital.

Fetishism has become such a key concept within Western thought, largely as a result of the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, that it is easy to forget its origins. But the notion of fetishism originates in a very different context, and in many ways, an incommensurable system of thought—animism. Returning to this submerged backstory, I deploy the concept of the fetish to confront the recent enthusiasm for materiality that has emerged in response to current environmental crises. New materialism considers matter to have a liveliness not dependent on human subjects. This paper considers what divides “vital materialism” from the “animist materialism” that continues to structure everyday experience in a range of contexts in Africa and elsewhere and investigates the way in which fetishism, within the intellectual tradition of animism, alerts us to the strange ephemeralness of the avowed materialism of the new materialist project.

In this introduction to the special issue, “Animating Theories of the Material: Approaching Animist Being in Postcolonial Literatures,” Rosemary Jolly and Alexander Fyfe consider the recent surge of interest in animisms within postcolonial studies alongside the roughly coeval turn to questions of materiality within the humanities. Introducing the five essays in the issue, they raise questions around the potential limitations of various forms of materialism, both “new” and “old,” and highlight possible ways in which postcolonial scholars might responsibly attend to animist modes of thought. They argue for the political importance and the ethical necessity of an approach to animisms that does not reduce them to a “theory” of the material, yet at the same time bears witness to the full range of materialities that obtain within such worldviews.

This article proposes the concept of noncapitalist wealth as a line of inquiry into the relations among capitalism, animism, and literary production. I begin by discussing the methodological implications of Harry Garuba’s influential essay on “animist materialism” and suggest that Garuba’s operating theory of capital means that his method ultimately leads to a mode of reading that understands animism as bearing primarily upon representation rather than on literary production. The result is a mode of reading that lacks sensitivity to the implications of the influence of specific animisms on individual texts. Eschewing an encompassing theory of animism’s relation to literary production, I propose the concept of noncapitalist wealth, derived in part from Karl Marx and anthropologists such as Jane I. Guyer, as a potential avenue of inquiry within the debate around literary animisms. I offer a reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road trilogy (1990–1998) to demonstrate the ways in which an operating concept of wealth, combined with a sensitivity to contemporary forms of capitalism, can help to reveal the political dimension of some literary texts.

This article examines a small group of artefacts of the Viking Age that may have been perceived as animated objects. These specific weapons and pieces of jewellery appear in narratives in the Old Norse sources as named, as having a will of their own, as possessing personhood. In archaeological contexts the same types of artefact are handled categorically differently than the rest of the material culture. Further, the possible links between these perspectives and the role of animated objects in early medieval Christianity of the Carolingian Empire are examined through studies of the reopening of Reihengräber and the phenomenon of furta sacra. By linking studies of the social biographies of objects with studies of animism, the article aims to identify aspects of Viking Age ontology and its similarities to Carolingian Christianity.