Reflections on ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought’

This is a response (written May 2021) to Tim Ingold’s paper, which can be read here.

In ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought’, anthropologist Tim Ingold presents a contemporary understanding of animism; a widely disputed term in anthropology (and beyond), which, ‘according to a long established convention… is a system of beliefs that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert’ (Ingold 2006, p.10). Ingold seeks to expose the fallacies within this convention, known to anthropologists as the ‘old animism’, highlighting several assumptions regarding universality, anthropomorphism, and the human/nature, culture/nature duality. Ingold offers a radical vision of the incipient ‘new animism’ based on the centrality of ‘meshwork’ relationships, emergence, and the ‘primacy of movement’, meanwhile acknowledging the plurality of context-based animisms present throughout various cultures. He concludes:

‘Knowing must be reconnected with being, epistemology with ontology, thought with life. Thus has our rethinking of indigenous animism led us to propose the re-animation of our own, so-called ‘western’ tradition of thought’. (p.19)

Ultimately, Ingold’s thesis is pitched towards a revival of other ways of knowing in the West - ways, he claims, that may benefit from the influence of ‘animic ontology’ in efforts to restore sensuousness and sanity to our relations with our natural environment and other-than-human kin.

Ingold begins with an essential insight - that ‘people do not universally discriminate between categories of living and non-living things. This is because for many people, life is not an attribute of things at all’ (p.10). Here, Ingold questions the assumption emanating from the mechanistic metaphysics of modernity that life can be understood in terms of a binary opposition between ‘living’ and ‘non-living things’. In light of the subjectivity of the word ‘life’, Ingold makes clear the limitations of perceiving reality through such a binary. By using the terms ‘categories’ and ‘things’, he points to the reductionist tendency to divide the world into conceptual segments and ‘objects’. This way of perceiving and experiencing does not accurately reflect reality for many people. Much of the non-Western world can be considered animist to some degree by virtue of cultures that cultivate more ‘right-brained’ views (McGilchrist 2009) and which integrate the bio-psycho-socio-spiritual-ecological conditions of being human against a backdrop of reverence for and connection to what many in the West call ‘nature’.

Ingold clarifies that animism is not ‘a way of believing about the world, but a condition of being in it’ (Ingold 2006, p.10). Here, the departure from the ‘old animism’ becomes apparent; the ‘new animism’ Ingold writes of rejects the notion of belief that previously misguided views regarding the ‘religious’ nature of animism, and instead turns towards action, sensuousness, and the embodiment of the values and principles that mediate the human relationship between world and kin. This insight re-situates the human within its sensate environment, averting the ‘meta-move’ that entangles us in an oftentimes illusory world of conceptual abstraction. By switching from ‘a way of’ to ‘a condition of’, Ingold asserts the inevitability of ‘being alive to the world’ when animisms are at play. He bolsters this by stating: ‘In the animic ontology, beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it’ (p.14). Ingold continues: 

‘Animacy, then, is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded… it is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds… continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence.’ (p.10)

Here, Ingold touches on several defining features of the ‘new animism’: emergence, immanence, and ‘the relational constitution of being’. By dissolving the subject-object duality and anthropomorphism that defined the ‘old animism’, Ingold presents an enticing vision of animism that, to me, feels far closer to a ‘genuine animism’ than previous theories emanating from the West, namely due to the sharper focus on direct experience and the dissolution of the ‘separate self’ within an inherently relational environment. 

Ingold later refers to an exchange between ethnographer Colin Scott and a member of the Wemindji Cree, in which the Cree man declares: ‘life is continuous birth’ (p.11). Ingold claims this goes ‘to the heart of the matter’, stating that ‘life in the animic ontology is not an emanation but a generation of being in a world that is not preordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual’ (p.11). He continues: ‘One is continually present as witness to that moment, always moving like the crest of a wave, at which the world is about to disclose itself for what it is’ (p.12). Here, Ingold uses the metaphor of a continually emerging wave to depict the experience of imminent revelation and the feeling of encountering life, again and again, as a ‘continuous birth’. These metaphors of birth and wave illustrate the sublime experience of expansion and connection available to those who participate in the world animistically. 

Ingold further emphasises the centrality of relationships and their concomitant patterns and qualities within the animist experience. He states: ‘In this animic ontology, beings do not propel themselves across a ready-made world but rather issue forth through a world-in-formation, along the lines of their relationships’ (p.9). Ingold once again encourages an ontological leap beyond the duality of subject-object relating and points to a more emergent, dynamic experience of being in a world that is ‘always in flux’. He continues: ‘The relation is not between one thing and another - between the organism ‘here’ and the environment ‘there’. It is rather a trail along which life is lived’ (p.13). Here, he points to the ‘primacy of movement’ within ‘animic ontology’ - movement, he emphasises, characterised by pathways instead of locations. Through this distinction, Ingold points to the prevalence of territories over maps, and to the continuity that heralds animistic relating. 

In summary, ‘Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought’ offers a perspective on animism that has, for me, both ‘re-thought’ animism and ‘re-animated’ thought. Ingold breathes life into a (still) widely misunderstood way of being by placing emphasis on the dynamic, emergent, inter- and intra-subjective qualities of ‘animic ontology’. By rallying for a reconnection between ‘knowing and being, epistemology and ontology’, Ingold offers a vision for a more integrated way of being that aligns, if not merges with the teachings and offerings of the ‘new animism’.