Introduction

This introduction seeks to situate Rethinking Relations and Animism within expanding debates and to set out the book’s chief contributions and contents. Debates about animism, relationality, materiality and ontology are of growing significance in multiple disciplines. Ethnologically focused or informed disciplines are foundationally about the nature of personhood and therefore perennially debate questions of relations not only between humans (“cultures”) but also between humans and the wider world. The identification of that wider world as comprising “nature”, “objects” and sometimes “supernatural” entities has been the subject of intense reflection, reevaluation and reconfiguration in recent decades. This introductory chapter explores the confluence of the “turns” to ontology and materiality that have been reciprocally reinvigorating to debates about animism and relationality. It sets out the key issues of the volume and introduces the primary arguments of the component chapters.