Animism
Animism, a religious and ontological perspective common to many indigenous cultures across the globe, is a belief in the “animation of all nature.” (The oft-quoted definition from the Victorian anthropologist E. B. Tylor.)
For self-identified animists, Graham Harvey explains, “the world and its various powers are neither good nor bad… but open, efficacious, and above all, relational.”
Tim Ingold: “We are dealing here not with a way of believing about the world, but with a condition of living in it.”
Far from abolishing or preventing distinctions, then, this sort of animacy produces differences locally and interactively. Beings become the kind of beings they are in relation to the other beings who interact with them in a particular time and place.
The result of this dynamic, relational structure is not uniformity, all-is-oneness, or a “pudding of one identity,” but “a web of interdependencies.” (cf. holobionts)
The indigenous attribution of agency ⚭
Per Mary-Jane Rubenstein in Pantheologies:
Each creature is directly responsible for the well-being of many beings at many times, but not for all beings at all times, and these “overlap[ping] connections” sustain a community united not by its identity to itself, but by its complex, mobile, and interrelated differentiations.
As one might note, however, these distinctions (between the physical and the metaphysical, the this-worldly and the otherworldly, or the religious and the ethical) are rooted in the oppositions between spirit and matter, creator and created, that “animism” purportedly rejects.
The implication is that the indigenous attribution of agency and even personhood to vegetal life is not irrational, infantile, narcissistic, or delusional (which is to say, religious); to the contrary, these insights are so sophisticated that “plant science” has confirmed them.
And it is precisely at this point that indigenous philosophies might congratulate earth-systems science for having finally caught up to what it has known all along; as Vine Deloria attests, “traditional Indians,” who have always asserted the animacy of the universe, “are quite amused to see this revival of the debate over whether the planet is alive.”