The New Animism: Exploring A Relational Worldview with Graham Harvey

It has been a great personal pleasure to welcome Graham Harvey to Embodied Pathways. I first met Graham in 1994, when I was one of the organisers of a Magical Conference in London—a fundraising event for the eco-pagan group, Dragon. That magical encounter ultimately led to Graham inviting me to speak at the first-ever academic conference on Paganism later that year. He would go on to become my PhD supervisor and has continued to support my research ever since.

Graham has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of animism—not as a primitive belief system, but as a sophisticated, relational worldview. His groundbreaking 2005 book Animism: Respecting the Living World challenged colonial frameworks and reframed animism as an ethical practice of engaging respectfully with other-than-human persons—rivers, stones, forests, and much more.

In our conversation, Graham shares the fascinating journey that led him to this work. His PhD research on ancient texts and self-identities eventually guided him toward exploring the vibrant world of paganism. Transformative experiences at the Stonehenge Festival and an indigenous powwow in Newfoundland sparked his deeper interest in relationships between humans and the larger-than-human world, laying the groundwork for his revolutionary approach to animism.

As Graham emphasised throughout our discussion, his work reveals that animism isn't about what people believe, but about how they act, speak, and relate within communities that include more than just humans. We explored the concept of "other-than-human persons"—a phrase that highlights the agency and personhood of non-human entities, challenging conventional views and encouraging us to reconsider how we engage with the world around us.

Graham's framing of what is often called New Animism entails "provocative re-evaluations of all ways of being, acting, thinking and relating" (The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, 2015). This raises urgent questions: What changes when we recognise a river or a mountain as a person deserving our respect? How do we live ethically within such a larger-than-human world? And perhaps most pressing in the midst of an ecological crisis, what might we learn from cultures that never forgot that the world is alive and animate?

We delved into how animism can inform our understanding of kinship and responsibility in a world that often prioritises consumerism and individualism, exploring the significance of ceremony, gratitude, and the active engagement required to foster meaningful relationships with the environment. This conversation serves as a powerful reminder that we have the capacity to cultivate respectful relationships with the world around us, drawing inspiration from both indigenous practices and our own lived experiences. I hope you find it as inspiring and thought-provoking as I did.

Graham Harvey on Wikipedia 

Transcript

Adrian:
It's a very personal pleasure to welcome Graham Harvey to Embodied Pathways. I first met Graham in 1994. I was one of the organizers of a magical conference in London, which was a fundraising event for the Eco-Pagan group, Dragon. After the event, Graham invited me to speak at the very first academic conference on Paganism, which took place later that year. He subsequently became my PhD supervisor and has continued to support my research ever since.

Graham has fundamentally reshaped how we understand animism, not as a primitive belief system, but as a sophisticated relational worldview. His 2005 book, Animism, Respecting the Living World, challenged colonial frameworks and reframed animism as an ethical practice of engaging respectfully with other than human persons, rivers, stones, forests, and much more. His work reveals that animism isn't about what people believe, but about how they act, speak and relate within communities that include more than just humans. Graham's framing of animism entails provocative re-evaluations of all ways of being, acting, thinking and relating. Animism asks urgent questions. What changes when we recognize a river or a mountain as a person deserving our respect? How do we live ethically within such a larger-than-human world? And perhaps most pressing in the midst of an ecological crisis, how might we learn from cultures who never forgot the world is alive and anima? I'm very much looking forward to this conversation.

Graham, welcome!

Graham:
Thank you for that introduction. I hadn't realised I'd done so much! Always good to be with you.

Adrian:
So just to kick off, to give people a sense of where you're coming from, what was it that drew you to this field of study in the first place?


Graham:
I did my PhD about ancient texts and it was about self identities and people using names to label themselves and others. I spent lots of time in libraries and archives and it was immensely boring to me and probably anyone else who's ever read any of it. But I was at the same time hanging out with people at Stonehenge Festival, and I started meeting pagans in various places. And I began to notice, just casually without thinking that I was noticing, I just realized that when people were doing ceremonies, stuff happened, like maybe something simple, like middle of a ceremony, a robin would come down from the trees and join the circle somehow, or be present. I thought that was interesting. And then as time went on, I then did more research, refocused my research to be about pagans of many kinds. I was kind of intrigued by what was going on in this kind of growth of paganism. And I got the opportunity to go and do a conference presentation in Newfoundland. It was a medical anthropology conference. And I went to talk about healing traditions, and the kind of shift from perhaps psychological healing that helps us to deal with being modern and all the pressures of how do you live a proper human life, despite all the pressures to be a consumerist, and so on and so on. And this conference was hosted on an Indigenous reserve near Phuket on the Conne River. And while I was there, with a lot of Indigenous people, I got to stay a bit longer. And they were doing ceremony about returning to their traditional ways, to some extent, a kind of experimental It's their first traditional powwow, which is traditional in the sense that it's not competitive, financed and so on. The end of the powwow, the very last honour song, as the elders and veterans who were dancing the last song around the drum group, the biggest of the eagles that lives across the river, flew over across the river. flew a perfect circle over the drum group, went back, and everybody, even the locals who see Eagles all the time, stopped and went, ‘Kitpu’, (Eagle). And the next day I was still hanging around and they were people saying, ‘Did you see that? That was the Eagle affirming, welcoming us back saying, why is it taking you so long to join in?’ And I kind of thought, well, this is interesting. Indigenous people now, reclaiming traditions, restoring relationships with the larger community around. And I thought this is a much more interesting project now. So I'll, I just, these people were great anyway. So I kind of shifted some attention to trying to find out what's it like to be an Indigenous person, again, in this hyper-modern, hyper-colonial world, and yet maintain that kinship is the most important thing and place is vital. So that's really the shift that started me on this animism pathway. Then of course, I picked up a number of books like David Abram's, but also other scholars who were beginning this work, like Nurit Bird-David and Philippe Descola and others. And yeah, I became more and more intrigued and began to find my bit of the path through trying to understand and communicate about animism.


Adrian:
Thank you. A lovely story. You identified your particular path. So how would you describe your approach to animism? What have you come, how have you, how do you understand it?


Graham:
Well, okay, so I'm a scholar of religion. And so the question that I ask that's different to some of the other people who've already started revisiting the word animism was to consider, first of all, what might be religion in these contexts? And a lot of the people that I was spending time with, Indigenous people, don't particularly like the word in religion, because it sounds like official institutions, belief systems and creeds and emphasis on a transcendent deity and so on. So they talked about spirituality So already for me, as a scholar of religion, I quite happily use both those words for the same thing, but I respect people's choice of words. But yeah, I was looking at ceremonies and world making stories, and the kind of, the old word for that would be myths, perhaps. So how do people make use of those? traditional stories in the new world of this world that we live in now. What ceremonies do they do? And so on. So those are kind of big emphases rather than the kind of anthropological worries about kinship. You're going to draw little pictures of who's related to who, and then they were worrying because different Indigenous communities would insist that they have kin who are other than human, and that's not necessarily the word they used. So there are bear clans and so on. And this became a kind of, is this a metaphor? So some of them were shifting a very immediate relationship into something somewhat more distant metaphor, symbol, representation. And I was struggling with those words because it seemed to me that people meant something much more immediate and personal. So that was the first strand of my journey through this revisiting of animism. But also, then I started thinking, okay, of all the kind of religious communities, events, relationships that I'd been part of or observed, how does one relate to another? Because in the study of religions, we've had a long standing problem with the imposition of a particular Protestant, Christian, European definition of religion as an individual personal belief in God. Okay, that's a relationship, but it emphasizes proper believing. And we've kind of imposed that or has been imposed in other places. And I started thinking, well, what happens if we turn the tables and we start elsewhere? And we say, what's taken for granted? What's ordinary? What's expected in this community? And then look again at these things that we think of as religions, including Protestant Christianity. And then you think, Go, let's pay a bit more attention to what happens, not just at the altar where they have bread and wine, but the other end of the church building where they have a cup of tea. And you go, if this is religion as well, because it's about community. And also, it's in a building, which shapes the relationships that people have. I noticed that more because I'd spent time with some Maori people in their wharenui, in their ancestral meeting houses. And the ancestor meeting house is an ancestor, not symbolizes, not represents, but is. So the building, the materiality, the structure shapes what can happen. Now, I'm not saying I was the first person in the study of religions to notice this material. structure, but it kind of began to influence my thinking more about relationships, not just with animals and plants, but with buildings, the technologies, the whole range of relations, Kim, that we have. So, yeah.


Adrian:
this is bringing us to the this idea of other than human persons and that's a very particular phrasing in a particular so i'm wondering could you unpack that a bit what how did you come to that particular way of putting it


Graham:
Yeah, so I mentioned a few people and I should have mentioned Irving Hallowell and Kiwik. So Irving Halliwell was an anthropologist back in the early 20th century, spending a lot of time with Anishinaabe or Ojibwe community in Manitoba, southern central Canada. And he come to understand that in the Anishinaabe language and related languages in that world, the grammar recognizes animate and inanimate genders. So, there isn't a masculine feminine gender, so obviously they recognise male and female beings, and so on. But in the speaking, in the storytelling, there's no word like he, she, and therefore also no word like it, our neutral. So Holloway was trying to understand how this works. Is it about, how does it shape your psychology, your relations, your sociology, your being with others in the world? So, you know, so if you've been in France, you might've asked somebody, okay, tables are marked grammatically as feminine in French. So we could have asked somebody, you know, do you treat tables differently to the way you treat some other thing that's supposedly masculine? Okay, I don't know what the answer would have been, but with this Anishinaabe elder, Kiwik, he asks this old man, elder, are all the stones we see around us here alive? And the old man says in a wonderful phrase, no, but some are. What does this mean? How How does some, how do you know some are alive and some are not? And the more that I read and reread Hallowell’s discussion and some of the responses to it, and spent more time with some other Anishinaabe people, it came to me that in some respects, Hallowell has asked the wrong question. So he's asking, What was partly a category question, is this alive or dead? As in standard English, stones are inanimate objects, they don't count for anything. So categorically, they're inanimate. So what does it mean? Are they inanimate? And Kiwik's going, well, the question really should be, he never says this out explicitly, but the question should be, not is it alive or dead, but am I in a right relationship? How do I relate with these particular stones? And then you reread Hallowell’s question, ‘Are all the stones around us here?’ And you go, he has got a clue that some stones, these present stones, might be different to stones that are not with us. So how do you know in actual life, in actual relationship, this stone rather than that stone? So there are stories that Hallowell tells about stones, particular stones that do things that indicate what we would perhaps call aliveness or consciousness or animacy in that old sense. But throughout that conversation and the other conversations, the emphasis is on relationship and energizing or enacting that relation, performing that relation and renewing that kinship. So Hallowell sums this up in this phrase, ‘other than human persons’. So in this world, there are only persons. So that's the big umbrella category. And then there are human persons, and there are bear persons, there are rock persons. And we only need to say other than human persons, because we're humans talking to other humans. If we were bears, we might say other than bear persons. If we were talking, yeah, and so on. So it's kind of quite a rich phrase. The problem has arisen, well two problems. One is that person seems quite philosophical to some people, quite distant. It's not a kind of ordinary everyday word. So a lot of people prefer to talk about kin, family, relation, and cousins, and these are the kind of more immediate words. But also, the problem I've had is when I've been talking with people about these ideas, using the phrase other than human persons, they keep going on about spirits and deities and other world beings, if I can use that phrase. And I go, no, I'm talking about hedgehogs, I'm talking about oak trees, and I'm talking about rivers and rocks. And, you know, we can talk about those other persons, and we should, the thunder beings and the creators and the tricksters and all of those, and lots of beings from our many different traditions. But first and foremost, it's the immediate relationships we have with those all around us that I think that's where animism bites and has an edge on some of these more philosophical and even legal discussions about the personhood of rivers and so on. Comes down to, who do you meet with? How do you say hello to them? How do you ask permission to spend time with them? And so on. sort of a long-winded engagement with the phrase, other than human persons. But I think it kind of gets to the heart of a lot of this stuff.


Adrian:
There's a quote from the Indigenous scholar Daniel Heath Justice that cuts to the nub of this. He says, ‘kinship is an active network of connections’, and ‘to be human is to be a good relative’. That seems to be, really brings it out.


Graham:
Yes, yes. Daniel’s work’s great. I mean, not only is academic scholarly writing, which is wonderful, but also he's written a number of animist fantasy novels, which are also well worth looking at kinship. But so yes, exactly that. It's an active network of connections. So, but it's the sense that Daniel and others emphasize that there is a network, This is an animate world. We are always persons, but there are ways to, in that sense, that phrase, activate, to make active this network, because we are not always relating actively. to all the beings around us, that would be exhausting. So just as we are all children of parents, we all have friends, some closer, some more distant. There are times, now that I've said it, people will be thinking about their parents or their family or their children or their cousins or their local cats or dogs or whatever, right? These are kin. But it's only when we are present with them, or that we are engaging by email or by phone or sending them a gift, some birthday or whatever, that those networks are active, those relations. And it's that point that we should be using the words like person. And it's that sense that Kiwik was talking about, that the stones are always persons in one sense, but only some are means, okay, I don't get on with this stone, this stone doesn't mean anything to me. But this one, that stone's special, that stone I have an immediate connection with. So, It's that kind of etiquette for making those, that network of relations active that I think is part of what we emphasize in talking about animist personhood. And to get away from these, again, categories, alive, dead, and person is a category, kin is a category. until you share a gift, shake a hand, breathe together, press noses, touch the tree, drink the water, say thank you to the bacteria who live in your elbow crook, express gratitude to the bacteria who live in your gut and without whom you'd be dead and all those things. So all of that makes relationships active. So yeah, and then as Daniel goes on, to be human is to be a good relative. So that's the vital bit. There is nothing in the world apart from relationships, but they're not all good relationships. Ignoring somebody, treating a rock as just a resource, that's still a relationship, but it's not a good one. So you've got to start treating rocks as beings who you ask permission. I mean, let's not talk about rocks, let's talk about cows and carrots, who are persons we want to eat, some of us, right. So to be a good human, you can't just assume that the carrot or the cow wants to be eaten, is there because it's just a cow, just a carrot. there has to be some way of saying please and thank you, or saying, sorry, is it okay? I need to take your life in order to live, but I'm not going to kill all the cows, all the carrots. There has to be some sort of limits to our consumption of the world. So there is this kind of, yeah, please, thank you, sorry, kind of ceremony, things again, not every day, not even every meal, necessarily, but regular times where we stop and we think the world isn't given to us just because we're human, not given to bears, just because they're bears. We have responsibilities, reciprocations, we have gifts to give, gifts to receive. And our gratitude, our thanks and our sorry, sorrows are part of all those relations.

So yeah, that's, I think, at the heart of what Daniel Justice and others write and talk and live in their academic and their ceremonial lives.


Adrian:
So that really brings to life how animism is enacted and embodied in everyday life. So it's not something that's believed, it's like it's what you do.


Graham:
Yes, I mean, you can theorise how the world is and obviously part of the academic job is to try and make sense of the way that people understand the world, the way they think about the world, the way they communicate about the world in stories, and ceremonies, and costumes, and all the things they do. But in the end, what's important in the animist world is the stuff that people do. That's partly why I kind of insist that this, whilst it's every day, and whilst all these, everything we do is relationship, you cannot continuously stop and talk to every stone. You can't say please and thank you to every carrot. You know, there's got to be moments where, you know, you act respectfully, you don't over consume, you don't mistreat, you don't, abuse the being, the persons whose lives you've taken, you know, killed too many carrots. But you can't, you can't continuously live in that kind of world in the same way that people with other kind of religious world views, religious world practices, well senses, they can't continuously be praying or meditating or whatever. They have to be times where they're doing other things. And so, so yeah, so animism is every day, but it's not it's not, every relationship doesn't have to be as focused as sometimes. So maybe some are, sometimes these things are more central. But of course, the more you do those things, the more you learn what's appropriate for a gift in one place, in one community. Once you learn what's the etiquette for engaging with a tree or a hedgehog or whatever, or a cow, the more it becomes your second nature, your everyday life, your assumption of the way things are. And that gets reinforced the more you do things, but also gets reinforced when, as we have to, we confront the other aspects of the larger human world when we go shopping, or when we have to fill in a tax form, or when we hear the news of what Trump's latest insanity is, and so on and so on. And then we're living in this modern world that wants us to be consumers and individuals, and all those other things, which are reducing our relations. And they want us to be to be accumulating our wealth rather than giving it out. So the gift giving economy of the animist world comes into conflict with the accumulative world of the late capitalist consumerist world. And we necessarily live in those two worlds, let alone all the other. worlds around us. So then we have to decide which, how to negotiate that, how to reinforce what we want to do. And I think this comes to the kind of thing that you and others do so much, which is the kind of environmental, ecological, active work, which for some people is profoundly animistic and for other people, it can still be about all kinds of other relations, limiting capitalism or limiting consumerism. There are lots of different justifications, but for some people, it's profoundly inspired by close animist relationships with a particular river or a particular forest or an individual tree, or an individual particular, nothing's an individual, despite the Life of Brian: 'We're all individuals. Well, I'm not'! The truth is, we're not individuals, we're all relations. We're made of relations. So yeah, so these, these things inspire people. And I think that's a common thread in when people are asked what inspired you to be an environmentalist or an ecologist, even a scientific ecologist, they start talking about childhood engagement with a local wood or park or tree or an animal they encountered and so on. And that gave them a love for the world - biophilia and all these other words that we've kind of come up with to emphasize sort of relationships some closer than others.


Adrian:
This brings up a key point, which is animism's very significant relevance to conversations about ecology, climate crisis and cultural change. I mean, it's really quite central to those discussions and practices, isn't it?


Graham:
Yeah, and I think, I think one of the things that's interested me in the last, what has it been, 30 something years of meeting with different kinds of animist, and there are many different kinds, because it's relations and localities and so on. is the way that the word animism and some of the phrases that animists and scholars of animism have used, have spread and been found to be a useful kind of car bumper sticker version or a slogan that summarizes things or gives you a headline So, you know, animism once meant something very different. Animism, when Edward Tyler, first professor of anthropology in Oxford, in the 18 whatevers - very bad at numbers - when he talked about animism, he used as a catchphrase or catch term for belief in God, belief in spirits. And he said, this is a very understandable, but mistaken interpretation of the world. We have dreams. And we think that when I dream about my deceased great grandmother, that actually I'm meeting her, she's the spirit. Or if I'm by a tree and an apple falls into my hand, the trees give me a gift. It's kind of, you know, but in reality, dreams are just eat too much cheese and gravity explains why apples fall and so on. And so it's an understandable but mistaken interpretation of the world that comes up with this notion of spirits and beliefs. And we're going to grow out of it. 

So, there are still people when I talk about animism, that start talking about belief in spirits, and they tell me experiences they've had. I'm not challenging those experiences they've had. I'm kind of intrigued by how that happens, what that means, how those beings exist in the cosmos. But that's not central to the animism. Certainly the belief thing isn't central to the animisms that interest me. I'm more interested in this kind of spread of relations between humans and other humans. that has inspired, yeah, environmental psychologists and lots of other people of different persuasions that, what's the right word? Empowers, provokes, inspires, activates them. You know, when frontline activists get exhausted by continuous confrontation, one of the restorative things that happens is often, go back and spend time with a tree that isn't threatened or a meadow that's not threatened and so on and so on. Just be quiet there and touch the ground, touch the tree, be there, breathe the air, drink the water and you find yourself ready to re-engage on behalf of others, and not just on behalf of them, but with them. The growing assumption that trees don't want to be destroyed either. So all of that comes into play. And therefore, I think ceremony happens more. It was kind of intriguing looking at many years ago, the Newbury Bypass protests, there were some of those protest camps, there was a lot more ceremony than others, there's always some sort of performance. And that's kind of great. And partly because it grabs attention of the media, the more colourful you are, the more attention you get, the more your cause gets spread. But the ceremonies that are not just about other humans, but the ceremonies that are about engaging with the trees. And I think there was a major moment where a particular tree was chopped down and there was a funeral mourning ceremony, and there have been many of those since, mourning ceremonies for the deceased glaciers - never work out whether it should be 'glaciers' or 'glaciers' whichever - that are now stopped flowing, stopped accumulating ice and now gone. And there have been these mourning rituals that are proliferating in different places, people putting out cairns of rocks, but also adapting ceremony that you might do when a respected human elder dies, adapting that to ceremony for other humans that die unnecessarily because of the human causes of climate change and over consumption and exploitation and extractivism. So yeah, so all of this ecological activist implications Vital, really, yeah, vital.

Adrian:
And I saw and experienced and engaged with a lot of that when I was involved with various protests over the years, so. Yeah. Well, Twyford Down comes to mind. Yes. And the Dongas tribe and the engagement with the land and the sacredness of the land. And personal engagements with particular trees that I've had - particular profound and sometimes very sad conversations. One with a tree that it was inevitable that it was going to be cut down. Those kind of conversations are powerful and they change you and I think they can be hugely empowering for environmental activists. You form a relationship with the tree that you happen to have your tree-house in, or the patch of ground that you happen to have your dwelling on, wherever it might be.


Graham:
And I think those relationships, even if you didn't start the activist engagement as an animist, or even knowing and never having heard the word, I think for many people, that very close, intense relationship, which is unusual in the modern Western world where we have been shifted away. we talk about. COVID, we were encouraged to go for walks in parks and so on, and these kind of restorative engagements with the world, but it was for our benefit. But something happened. I mean, I just think COVID was such an opportunity for the world to shift, but we very quickly reverted. But even there, people were making relationships with land and place, which aren't normal. and every day now, and much more intense, as you say, within those kind of activist front line, and places like Twyfordown and the Indigenous people confronting mining and the destruction of the Amazon and so on and so on. So I think for a lot of people afterwards, then they begin to find the stories and the language and the dramas and the performances, and then the ceremonies that make so much more sense when you've made that relationship. So yeah, I think that that's part of this kind of proliferation of ways in which people identify as animist now, which has been Yeah, intriguing to see. Because I think once you'd have said it was a kind of anthropology, spending time with Indigenous communities, finding a label for them. And now, there are lots of people who are wanting to be animists and deal with the modern world and try to negotiate that, those relations and recovering ceremonies. Yeah, recovering is quite good, isn't it? It's like alcoholic recoverers. And so we're a kind of, animus in recovery from modernity, which is, I kind of, I've been thinking about modernity as being a human separatist movement, which is, which isn't natural, it doesn't, doesn't just happened, we are taught. There's been this thread of understanding that animism is a kind of childish thing that you grow out of, whether that's a cultural childishness in the ancient past or in Indigenous communities that allegedly they should learn to be modern and so on. Or whether it's something that young children are immediately animistic, naturally, but they grow out of it. Well, they don't grow out of it, they're taught out of it. We kind of play along for a while, you know, naughty table hurts you, kind of bad table. And then we get the kids to think, no, no, don't be so clumsy and bump into the table. So, you know, the world isn't like that. And okay, you can talk to your cat and you can imagine your cat communicates something more than I want to eat this or whatever. Let me out. No, I don't want to go out, cats. But the, the animism of the real animate world is something that is learnt through life. So the more time we spend with Indigenous people, the more I've come to understand that elders are usually more animistic than the children. So the children might have some idea, but it's the adults who, well, you learn the etiquette, you learn what's the appropriate gift, what is what activates this community, this network, this place community. So you can give tobacco in one place or you can give beer, but those two things are not the same. I mean, you don't pour beer in North America, for example, in most places, that's not a traditional gift to give to elders or trees or rocks or whatever, eagles. So finding the local etiquette is the thing you do, and knowing what kind of ceremony, how to do that dance, what story to tell, how the story goes, how that story gets adapted, because of new experiences, all those things, they're learnt throughout life, or several lives maybe. So yeah, so I kind of, you know, yeah, and it would be interesting to see what happens if children were brought up and continue to be encouraged to treat the world as a relational world. You know, not just on the odd, send a gift to somebody or decorate a stone during COVID to say thank you to somebody. You know, they're kind of these little pebbles I keep finding still. down on my regular walk on the riverbank, I still kind of find that people have left little pebbles saying something nice or just pretty colours, which I think started during COVID. How do we carry on that? And maybe forest schools, but then when those kids, at some point, they then have to go to the big school and stop being animists and stop learning outdoors and all this kind of, yeah.

Sorry, I'm going off on tangents.

Adrian:
This is kind of the nub of it because I've seen people who had no conception of animism, never even thought of, knew what it was or never thought anything about trees being alive. They spend time in a road protest site or there's Stephanie Gottlob who I spoke to on the very first episode of this podcast. She went out into all sorts of places around North America and danced in wild places and things started to happen. The birds or the trees started to appear to dance and improvise with her and she came to understand, to have an animist sensibility. sort of almost just because of their experiences. So that happens, and it seems to me the next stage is, okay, so this is going on. What do I do with that? How do I then integrate this into my life and make it a practice that I can actually honour those relationships every day?


Graham:
It's a powerful shared experience that many people have of going somewhere away from their ordinary everyday environment. having some experience and then coming back and finding the world changed, finding themselves changed. And I really like this idea of somebody who's already, from what you said, I'm afraid I hadn't heard of Stephanie Gottlob before, but I'm going to find out more about her, follow her thing. But when you mentioned her, it reminded me of wonderful article by Ron Grimes, who riffs off a thing that the beat poet Gary Snyder once said. So Gary Snyder was asked something like, what does the world get from us? You know, we go into the world and we ask for the trees to provide us with wood or ask to give us some food or the animals give us their fur or their meat or whatever. We get stuff. What do they get from us? So Gary Snyder comes up with this wonderful, wonderful sentence, which is, “performance is currency in the deep world's gift economy”. So you work backwards through that. There's a gift economy. So we give gifts, birthdays, Christmas, festivals, whatever. That's still an economy. It's the way we maintain, keep relationships going. But generally, you know, if we don't do that all the time, you know, there are lots of things and the more you think about it, the more gifts you give. So you're visiting somebody, you take them a bunch of flowers, a bottle or whatever. So there's a gift economy. The deep world is the animate world that we live in, that we really live in, which is all about relations. So in that world, the economy is not about accumulation, about consumption, it's not about being a a big person, because you've got more, if you have got more, it's to give it away. You, in lots of Indigenous communities, sure, you spend some years gathering, whether it's the pigs or the bronzes or whatever, to give away in a massive ceremony. And then you're the big person, the respected person. So the gift economy is activated. made relational by this gift economy in this deep world. And the gift that we humans give, because we're fairly pathetic creatures who need other animals to fur, to keep us warm, and plants, fibers to keep us warm. And, you know, no other being much needs that. When you decorate ourselves, there are some birds that decorate their bowers and so on, but, you know, we're these kind of needy creatures. What we give back is performance. So Ron Grimes, who's a fantastic ritual studies scholar, his riff, which is called Performance as Currency in the Deep World's Gift Economy, which you can find online. He says, so find the performance that you can do, go out and play that song, dance that dance, recite that poem. You know, I mean, it's a great provocation. So when I reread it a number of, at least once a year, sometimes more, And then I got to put it down, even if I pick it up to read it, just because I want to quote it, then I have to put it down and go off and say hello to a tree. And I'm a little song, I'm not a good singer. And I'm not sure about telling a long story to a tree, but you know, I'll say a few more words. I'm not a great dancer. But yeah, do something to say, I'm here, you're here. And that again, builds up because it's, you know, you can do it with different trees, but hey, why should a tree that you've never met before pay you any attention? You wouldn't do that with another human, just walk down the road and go, hi, let me tell you about my life. Let me sing you a song. I mean, you could try it, but there are places you might get injured. So, you know, doing it regularly builds up a relationship and maybe after a while something happens, you know, on a calm day, a breeze appears to get up or the tree moves as if there was a breeze or the birds you're singing to pause for a second and then suddenly they're nearer to you and they sing a different you know, stuff happens. And I say that as a totally rational scholar of religion, knowing that every religious person in the world who's been within their religious community for more than a few days will tell you a story that proves their religion to be true. They pray, something happens, they meditate, something happens. So how do you explain something happens when people do something? And so I've seen enough different religious communities to see stuff happening. So I refuse to say, my animism, my animist practice is the only truth. Because I've seen people having prayers answered or meditation, bringing them what they want and so on and so on. So something happens is important. But I could tell you a whole lot of stories about how animist ceremonies strange and wonderful, but in the end, to be expected, things happen. If you're going to talk, if you're going to invite the wind to join your ceremony, you expect the wind to kind of blow through. So stuff happens, sometimes much more powerful and sometimes less. Sometimes, you know, quite, you'd have to be paying real attention to notice, but that's what animists do, I think.


Adrian:
Yeah, and that kind of takes us back to the beginning where Daniel Heath Justice was saying that we needed to find ways in which the human can be ‘a good relative’. Yeah. And this is how we do that.


Graham:
Yeah. We do that. So yeah, so we do ceremony. We spend time, several episodes building relationships, not assuming that suddenly we'll be welcoming to a wooded glade and Bambi will turn up, lovely. We expect to be challenged. we expect to be told, you know, bugger off, you're just another human. You're making a lot of noise. We're trying to get on with whatever. But also, the being a good relative means not being an extractivist, not taking more than we need. It means challenging the mining and the It means not consuming more than we should. So yeah, there are feasts. Feasting is important. The world gives us stuff to eat. We should enjoy it. We shouldn't be, Oh, well, I'm going to, I'm really sorry I've got to eat this carrot because I've got to live, you know. No, if you're going to eat a carrot, enjoy it. It's given up its life. And again, this is English is such a non animistic language, but I'm saying it, they give us their lives, they want to be eaten and they want to be enjoyed. So yeah, the pleasure, but also the kind of not taking more and therefore not throwing stuff away. There is no away in the animate world. There is nowhere this stuff can go. So, there's lots of things that make this not a romantic world. One of them is that, that the romantic, the animal world is a challenge, because, you know, going to a supermarket, it's really difficult to buy just a few carrots, you know, it's easy just to pick up a big bag. I can't eat that many carrots. So what do you do? You can compost. So, you know, there's things like that you can do. But one of the other challenges is that in this animate world, okay, we've got to be good relatives, but so have the lions, so have the mosquitoes, so have the E. coli bacteria. They've got to somehow be good relatives. Okay, they've got to live and they live by eating and doing stuff that isn't necessarily good for us. So again, this is another negotiation. So the richest bit of writing that I've read about this is a piece by the late great Val Plumwood, who was an environmental feminist philosopher, who was attacked by a crocodile. And the people around her said, right, we'll go and kill the crocodiles. And she said, no, hang on. I was in the wrong place. A crocodile was policing that stretch of river. I shouldn't have been there. I didn't have permission. It was the wrong time. The crocodile was doing what it should have done. And so her writing, this piece of writing is called Being Prey. And in the end, you know, whilst all the other things we can say about humans, we think of ourselves as the top of the food chain, we're not. We're not somehow separate. We're part of a food chain. And so we've got to negotiate that one too. And think about the other things we give back. Maybe we give back the nutrients of our bodies at some point, or many points, bits of us, and then eventually our bodies, maybe there's a way that we can redo the return of bodies back to the ecosystem. But that's another imagining of the future. Yeah, so being prey, performance is currency in the deep world's gift economy. These are, other than human persons, these are all great encapsulations to me of the stuff that you see happening in animist communities or communities trying to be animist, being good relations against all the stuff that's imposed on them and us.


Adrian:
Right, that sounds encouraging. It sounds that this is happening and we have the capacities and the understandings to really develop this and take it forward.


Graham:
Yeah. And that it's happening in those contexts of within the modern capitalist, elitist world, we're rebuilding, we're rediscovering that actually, we do have bits of gift economy, we do have relations, we do have closer friendships with some animals or some plants and others. and we just need to go, it's not that difficult, you know, we just need to re-find what's the etiquette here, what's the way of doing it, we need to remind ourselves we live in places with watersheds and all of those kind of localities and we're not just global beings, but we in the end and are necessarily animate beings. We're a community of human and other than human bacteria and human beings and we can learn with respect from Indigenous and other people. And then we can be reminded that, hey, we have relationships with our computers and our artworks and our musics that are also in some rich way animistic and they're not that difficult to build up. If we can escape from the consumerist, capitalist, separatist world, that's the challenge.


Adrian:
Right, wonderful. Well, it is a challenge, but the resources are there. I think that's what I'm hearing. So I think that's inspiring and empowering note to bring us to a conclusion. Yeah. Thank you very much, Graham. Much appreciated. And I look forward to next time we meet up.

Graham:
Thanks very much, it's been a pleasure and an honour.

Adrian:
Cheers Graham - bye bye!

Graham:
Thanks, bye.