ABSTRACT

This chapter explores Catherine Knutsson's and Ambelin Kwaymullina's varying literary instantiations of an animist discourse by means of three critical paradigms: the "animist materialism" developed by Harry Garuba, the "animic ontology" explored by Tim Ingold, and the "poet-shaman aesthetics" coined by Gloria Anzaldúa and elaborated by AnaLouise Keating. These four theorists, spanning various geographic locations and disciplines, are alike in critically analyzing the place and function of animism in human relationships with our wider environment. Harry Garuba, whose research centers on West African societies, questions the applicability of western-derived ecological paradigms to non-western cultures where animist beliefs and practices in here in a still extant belief in other-than-human forces. A tendency to assimilate new sociocultural developments into an inherently animist framework, Garuba notes, leads West African societies to "continually spiritualize the object world, acknowledging and appropriating recent material developments and discoveries and animating them with a spirit".