ABSTRACT
People who have such an understanding of life – and they include many among whom anthropologists have worked, in regions as diverse as Amazonia, Southeast Asia and the circumpolar North – are often described in the literature as animists. According to a long established convention, animism is a system of beliefs that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert (see Chapter 2, p. 28). But this convention, as I shall show, is misleading on two counts. First, we are dealing here not with a way of believing about the world, but with a condition of being in it. This could be described as a condition of being alive to the world,
characterised by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux, never the same from one moment to the next. Animacy, then, is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded. Rather – and this is my second point – it is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence. The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation.
