Animism, in its contemporary philosophical and anthropological sense (sometimes called “new animism” to distinguish it from the colonial-era category), names the recognition that other-than-human beings — animals, plants, rivers, stones, winds — are persons: that is, relational beings with their own perspectives, agencies, and social lives. This is not a belief that rocks have human minds inside them but a different understanding of what personhood is. In animist ontologies, personhood is not a property possessed by a special class of beings (humans) but a relational capacity that emerges through engagement, reciprocity, and attention.
Graham Harvey, who has done the most to rehabilitate animism as a serious philosophical category, defines animists as 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. This framing makes animism a form of relational ontology: beings are constituted through their relationships rather than existing as independent substances that then enter into relationships.
The colonial history of the term matters. Nineteenth-century anthropology, beginning with Edward Tylor, treated animism as a “primitive” stage of religious development — the error of attributing souls to objects. This classification served settler-colonial projects by positioning Indigenous ontologies as pre-scientific mistakes to be corrected through civilization and education. The new animism refuses this evolutionary schema. The question is not whether Indigenous peoples are “right” that rivers are persons (which would reinstate Western naturalism as the arbiter) but what kind of world one lives in when rivers are recognized as persons — and what kind of world one produces when they are not.
Animism connects to the ontological turn and perspectivism as convergent refusals of the nature/culture divide. It also connects to ecological thought: if other-than-human beings are persons with whom one has relationships of reciprocity and obligation, then ecological destruction is not resource mismanagement but the violation of social relations — a framework that resonates with Indigenous critiques of extractivism.
Related terms
- Perspectivism — the Amerindian ontological framework
- Ontological turn — the broader philosophical movement
- Relational ontology — the philosophical position animism enacts
- Extractivism — what the refusal of animism enables
- Land-based education — education rooted in relationships with other-than-human persons
- Graham Harvey — principal theorist of new animism