Animism is a dynamic, relational structure
Animism is a belief in the “animation of all nature” (E. B. Tylor), where “the world and its various powers are neither good nor bad… but open, efficacious, and above all, relational.” (Graham Harvey)
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.” —Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies
- see also: we are collaborative compound organisms—partaking in systems fabulously more complex than we realize
- see also: we exist only in relationship to others