The Turn

I called this project The Animist Turn because I believe that animism(s) can enhance us to re-turn ourselves into the broader-than-human community we belong to.

I endorse animism as a twofold path to enhance exploring embodied and relational practices and stories in past and present religions and spiritualities & as a reciprocal way to engage with the community of life, to heal the wound that separated us from the living Earth. By following the path of trees, I will draw my footsteps into animism and its relational stories.

SEEDS | Stories

According to Val Plumwood, the role of art, writing and storytelling is crucial for re-animating and re-enchanting the world and for allowing nature to speak in the active voice. Stories, including myths, songs, poems, movies, visual art and performances, have the power to give voice to the different other-than-human inhabitants of the land, and, simultaneously, to reach our fleshy cords, bringing us back to our human rootedness to the local landscapes, to the earthly ground and the shared breathing of the world.

Old and collective narratives from Indigenous and traditional communities of the world, together with the new stories by writers, artists, activists, scholars, traditional healers, storytellers, scientists are pivotal forces that can transform our relationship with the living world, and mend the cut that separated us from the rest of the multi-species community we call nature. Such stories are not only sources of cosmological or mythological worlds, but also treasure troves of the multiplicity of human-environmental relations and knowledges, and of embodied teachings about existence that celebrate different ways of being human.

My research and pen are devoted to weave together the twigs of old and new animist stories that support care, reciprocity and kinship for a more-than-human anthropology and an ecological education. All seeds to be spread to the wind, longing for new ground where they can thrive.

BRANCHES & LEAVES | Plant Persons

In face of the magnitude of Earth’s ecological challenges, recent years have seen a renewed and growing interest in vegetal life from plenty of perspectives and nuances in the humanities, social and natural sciences. Such trans-disciplinary and thriving field, often called the Vegetal Turn, is generating conversations within and beyond academia that seek to dismantle the hegemonic understanding of plants as inert beings to be merely commodified, promoting the idea of plants as other-than-human persons, possessing sentience, autonomy and communication, and advocating ethical and respectful relations with them. These notions are found in a variety of Indigenous and marginal(ized) botanical knowledges, stories, practices, philosophies and spiritualities worldwide, along with recent groundbreaking scientific discoveries in the field of plant cognition, biology and ecology. Such relational and non-hegemonic plant knowledges are nurtured by feelings of participation, reciprocity and rootedness to specific ecosystems and plants through stories, ceremonies and practices of reciprocal care. Once plants are seen as more than mere resources, they can be acknowledged as sentient other-than-human persons and wise teachers which inspire celebration of the inherent inter-dependence of all life and advance an ethics of gratitude, reciprocity and care between humans, plants and the broader-than-human community.

TRUNK | (New) Animism

While delving into ancient religions and mythologies, I took my first steps into the world of animism, which has become my trunk, ever enlarging and strengthening year after year. After this term was dismissed due to its colonialist and evolutionistic connotations, in the last decades animism has been recovered by scholars of religion and anthropology. A new, relational and decolonizing notion has emerged. According to Graham Harvey, ‘animists’ are “people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others. Animism is lived out in various ways that are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) towards and among other persons” (Harvey 2017, xiii). With personhood being acknowledged in spirits, deities, animals, plants, stones, mountains, seas, rivers, places and weathers, nature is recognized and experienced as a living and animate community, and due care and respect. By acknowledging that relationality and inter-dependence are at the very core of life, animistic worldviews, stories, ceremonies and practices radically challenge the dominant ontology of Anthopocene with its capillary project of de-animating the living world, and foster the synergy between social and environmental justice. As an approach that is enlivening conversations and promoting further research about and among relational ontologies, cosmologies and religions, New Animism brings back to the terrestrial stage the multiplicity and vitality of traditional knowledges, and advances a wider and inclusive understanding of religion/spirituality. Moreover, animism should be understood as a relational and non-anthropocentric way of being and of knowing that is currently being reclaimed from different standpoints, from philosophy to literature, from science to art.

ROOTS | Ancient religions and mythologies

My journey into the field of religion, nature and culture, started during a time of illness. During the months of recovering, closely engaging with nature and its inhabitants on a daily basis was profoundly healing, and made me realize that we are all inter-related and that the healing path for our wounded humanity and Earth is to re-root as nature-kind. My mind often recalled ancient myths, tales, incantations, prayers, and rituals, where non-humans recur consistently as playing countless roles in the religious life of the ancients. So, in a serendipitous way, I re-discovered the term animism and decided to explore its potentialities in the study of ancient Mesopotamian religion and mythology. In my doctoral research I readdressed and uncovered some modalities of human-environmental relationships by studying how mountains, rivers and trees were embedded within the ancient Mesopotamian religious framework through the lens of new animism. I argue that mountains, rivers, trees and plants were regarded as cosmic entities, deeply entangled with the sacred landscape, as other-than-human persons, and sometimes as deities, which engaged in a multitude of ways with the life of ancient Mesopotamians. This insight sheds new light onto the sacred landscape of the ancient Mesopotamians, and highlights the actual fluidity and sensuous reality of those ancient polytheisms. My book suggests that animism is a fruitful conceptual tool to readdress ancient, pre-Modern religions and cosmologies, and explore worldviews which did not possess the concept of nature as developed within the Euro-Western and monotheistic ontology.