Graham Harvey is a British scholar of religious studies whose work has been central to rehabilitating animism as a serious philosophical and anthropological category. A professor of Religious Studies at the Open University, Harvey has argued against the colonial-era dismissal of animism as “primitive” belief, proposing instead that animism names a relational ontology in which personhood extends to other-than-human beings — not as a projection of human qualities onto objects but as a recognition that the world is populated by many kinds of persons, only some of whom are human.
Core ideas
- New animism: a reclamation of animism from its Tylorian definition (“belief in spirits”) toward a relational understanding — animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons and that life is lived in relationship with them.
- Relational personhood: personhood is not a fixed property of a special category of beings but a relational capacity. What makes something a person is how it engages in relations of reciprocity, communication, and mutual obligation.
- Critique of Western naturalism: the reduction of other-than-human beings to objects, resources, or mechanisms is not neutral description but a specific ontological commitment — one that enables extractivism.
Notable works
- Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005; 2nd ed. 2017)
- The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (editor, 2013)
- Food, Sex, and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (2013)
Related
- Animism — the concept he has theorized
- Ontological turn — the broader philosophical movement
- Relational ontology — the philosophical framework new animism enacts
- Eduardo Viveiros de Castro — fellow theorist of ontological difference