ABSTRACT
How are anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene connected? What is the part played by the former in leading the planet into the latter? Much has been said about the persistent legacy of the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter. What is called for given the present pace of human-caused degradation of the natural world, however, is to challenge that dualism from the vantage point of a very different cosmology – namely panpsychism, the view that nature is precisely not inert, insentient, and devoid of experience and value but that it is the locus of so many species-specific ways of actively responding to nonhuman as well as human agents. A shift must be made from abstract philosophical debates about how to reconcile the set-apart “substances” of mind and matter, to engaging with concrete ethnographic studies of how a kind of cosmology that refuses to acknowledge this dualism is lived, is acted upon. In the present work, this shift is guided by the proposition that animism is panpsychism in practice.
