The whole animism thing appeals to me. Indeed, the more I think in these terms the more "right" it feels. For example, I was thinking about the garden and the entanglement of plants and creatures. Because of something I have been writing, I was led into the animistic entanglement by thinking about Son of Bob.
Bobbit inhabited multiple worlds. He was fully engaged with the other earth-beings in my garden. The lilac trees reached out their branches to support his perching. The worms and grubs shrank away from his probing beak. Leaves sheltered him. He and a rat eyed each other curiously. A squirrel, leaping onto the fence, caused him to take off abruptly. The blue tits chased him away from their nest and the robins responded to his song and his ruddy breast. A neighbour’s cat finally killed him. But during the single year of his life, this few feathered grammes of brown, beige and orange-red led me into a profound and emotional acknowledgement of the multi-species composting in the scrubby space behind my house.
It was not a case of parts and wholes in this place, but of overlapping entities. Intra-action all the way up and all the way down. And not intra-acting things, but intra-acting agential processes. The growth of plants alters the paths animals take on the ground; their footfall alters the growth of the plants. Sun-seeking shoots on trees change the places where birds perch and release nutrients or seeds, which changes the soil and ground-flora community. My bird-feeding increases the number of birds in the garden, which impacts the invertebrates. My horticultural laziness (and thus the weeds, or wild plants, as I prefer to call them) impacts the invertebrates too. The presence of animals and birds, the shapes of the plants, impacts the way I behave and move in the garden. We are all engaged in the co-creation of a living space. And the robin? That redbreasted person, with his cheerful friendliness, encouraged me to see the garden, as much as I could, through his eyes and, by extension, through their eyes, all their eyes, all their senses, all their minded, mindful mattering. We might, myself and the mammals, birds, invertebrates and plants, have only partially overlapping ontologies, but we could still flower together. From an unprepossessing urban garden to a place where mutual ecologies and collaboratively co-produced niches could blossom.
All of this is very different to what Erik Jampa Andersson describes here:
Anthropocentric disenchantment is a toxic, delusional, and scientifically indefensible ontology which profoundly hinders our ability to effectively understand and engage in the world. An animistic worldview is a more suitable basis for effectively grappling with the complexities of environmental ethics, ecology, the climate crisis, and what it means to be human in a more-than-human world.
Instead, when I think of the garden, or a park or a woodland, in this way, I am experiencing what he describes as enchantment:
Enchantment [refers to] the fundamental cocktail of wonder, empathy, and joy that arises when we behold the magical beingness of an ‘other.’ It is a relational experience - one that emerges through connection, not through instrumentalist knowledge. Without it, we our capacity to meaningfully engage with others becomes severely debilitated, particularly with those who may appear most different to ourselves.
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