Interview with Graham Harvey

ANIMISM AND PAGANISM TWO SIDES OF THE SAME “TURN”?
by Adrián Navigante

Graham Harvey is Professor of Religious Studies at the Open University of the UK and ecological activist engaged in various initiatives to face the global crisis of the XXI century. His research and practice of different forms of contemporary European paganism makes him a rather heterodox scholar questioning ethnocentric views of appropriation, circulation, and transmission of knowledge.
Graham Harvey’s work combines scholarship with other – more performative – styles of writing to counterbalance world-wide ecocide, the destruction of local traditions in non-Western cultures, reactionary politics of identity, and religious fundamentalism.
The following interview, a lengthy dialogue subsequent to the 2023 transcultural interaction with Graham Harvey in Italy entitled “Animism and Paganism: A Transversal Approach”, focuses on three of his most significant books: Contemporary Paganism (1997), Food, Sex & Strangers (2013), and Animism: Respecting the Living World (revised and updated edition 2017). The 2023 interaction was organized by the Interstices Team at the Alain Daniélou Foundation. As a complementary text, Transversal Paths reproduces Graham Harvey’s Animist Manifesto (2012), a text widely circulating on the net, which has been translated into various languages over the last twelve years.

I – CONTEMPORARY PAGANISM

Adrián Navigante: I would like to start with a comment on your book Contemporary Paganism, published in 1997 and reedited in 2011. Last century some authors claiming strong bounds with Nature announced different versions of a “return to Paganism”; your book shows that this “return” has already taken place, beyond legitimation strategies, through a renewal that flourishes in diverse non-hierarchical and non-dogmatic religious movements related to Nature and the Earth. Upon closer look, Paganism does not seem to you a heritage of the past at all, but a reality of the present. It is interesting that you don’t use the concept “neo-pa- ganism”, unlike other authors, for example Michael York. You define Paganism as a religion of the present without thematically resorting to “ancient Paganism”, whose different expressions in pre-Christian times still seem important in contemporary Pagans’ legitimation claims. Does your disregard of that imaginary claim of continuity between ancient and contemporary go hand in hand with a conviction that there are viable modern versions of Paganism (in the British Isles and eventually in Western Europe), or do you think that contemporary Paganism is supported and legitimated by its own elaborated ritual structure, its creative self-narrative, and its strong link with significant issues of the present – such as ecology and female empow- erment?

Graham Harvey: Thanks, this is a fine comment and question to start with! You return me to a book that signaled a change of interests after my PhD. And you provoke me to think again about the themes of “returning”, antiquity and modernity, legitimation, and creativity. I suspect that much of our conversation will circulate around those themes.

Sometimes the accidents (fortuitous or regrettable) of encounters and experiences shape a researcher’s understanding and trajectory. The first Pagans I got to know well were in the UK and were anarchic and focused on infusing contemporary popular culture with what might be called “the celebration of Nature”. We’ll come back to “Nature” later, I’m sure! The term “neo-Pagan” – with or without a hyphen – wasn’t one I heard much until I encountered more North American groups, books, and discussions. But, more importantly, those first Pagans I got to know didn’t make claims to have inherited or continued an ancient tradition. Or, when they did so, it was hardly serious. For example, one Druid began some rituals by reading a script with the words “Our tradition is an ancient, honor- able and oral tradition” – which always involved quickly putting the script behind his back. Orality was restored along with some self-parody. But the antiquity of this version of Druidry was never seriously asserted. Certainly, eighteenth and nineteenth century heroes like William Blake, Iolo Morganwg, and William Price were vener- ated, but so too were Wally Hope, who founded Stonehenge People’s Free Festival in 1972, and a host of contemporary rock, punk, and folk musicians. This was a self-consciously Paganism for this age and for present-day generations.
Happily, other scholars have traced the real histories of the diverse branches of contemporary Paganisms. The work of Ronald Hutton is pre-eminent here – and is rightly valued by most Pagans. Indeed, Pagan engagement with Ronald’s work has led to a re-assessment and setting- aside of most of those “origins stories” that did assert ancient lineages. Paradoxically, perhaps, this has allowed some trends to emerge that, perhaps, do make some aspects of Paganism more like older traditions. I think this is what you mean by “viable modern versions”. Pagans seem more relaxed now about asserting polytheistic and animist ideas and practices without treating these as only metaphorical or psychological. Some have also made interesting use of regional folklores and performances to create or reinvigorate rituals supportive of efforts to deal with the joys and dangers of the contemporary world.
There’s an additional reason why I’ve never found the term “neo-Pagan” and claims to be “returning” to ancient tradition useful. And this is true of the term “New Religious Movement” that has been applied to many religious groups. It is that the idea of novelty rarely generates anything particularly interesting for either scholarly debate or practitioner involvement.
Nonetheless, it is clear that Paganism is a product of Modernity (a term I capitalize in the tradition of Bruno Latour, making the point that the term identifies a cultural, political, and economic project rather than merely a temporal phase). Although this Modernity of Paganism has led me to say some negative things to and about some Pagans, it is one foundation on which more ecological and more feminist and liberatory practices and lives can be built. Perhaps we’ll come back to that.
In short, what interests me is the ways in which people live and perform their religions. And, yes, the rituals and rhetorics of Paganism work well as ways of enacting and contesting elements of the contemporary world. And they do so in ways that would not have worked well for previous generations.

Pagans seem more relaxed now about asserting polytheistic and animist ideas and practices without treating these as only metaphorical or psychological.

Adrián Navigante: I would like to briefly recall and analyze the main definitions of Paganism you give in your book: 1. “A religion at home with the Earth” (Preface, p. xv)¹, 2. “What Pagans do and say” (Ibidem), 3. “A religion in which respectful relationships between humans and all others with whom we share life on Earth are significant” (Ibidem, p. 16), 4. “A polytheistic and/or animistic religion that celebrates life and living” (Chapter 1, p. 2), 5. “[A] diverse, pluralist, growing and living spirituality” (Chapter 1, p. 16). This is quite a varied spec- trum, and certainly not at all simple to synthetize. From what one can read in these definitions, we are facing not only a pluralistic and diversified phenomenon, but also some paradoxes that, in my opinion, need some clarification. Paganism is an “earthly”, an “embodied” religion (as opposed to a heavenly and spiritualized creed), but it can still be called “spiritual”. Paganism acknowledges many gods but at the same time surpasses the polytheistic view by rendering the whole spectrum of beings as “souled”: not only gods but animals, plants, and different natural phenomena (from mountains to rivers). The parameters of Paganism, judging from the groups operating in different parts of Europe and the world, are “regional” or “local”, yet it gives the impression, as a planetary movement, of a “world-wide phenomenon” with an integrating force. You write that Paganism nurtures “freedom” and “tolerance”, which are two values stemming from our urbanized liberal society – as opposed to the community-related, rural, or even wild-life aspects that are usually appended to it in contemporary discourse. Do these paradoxes involve a form of social tension, a lived contradiction, or a demanding challenge among Pagans today or are they fully indifferent to them?

Graham Harvey: I’m impressed and honored by your close reading! And you are right, I seem disposed not to systematize matters. That’s a fault when it leads to a lack of clarity. Reading those definitions again now, I think I’d stick with the “Paganism is what Pagans do and say” and the one about diversity and plurality. I’d nuance the rather grander claims. That is, I’ve come to agree with some critiques within the Pagan community that I overplayed ecology and feminism. Again, I first met Pagans for whom these were formative. Initially I met fewer of the more esoteric and self-development focused Pagans. Nonetheless, I think that environ- mentalism and feminism (and other liberatory movements) have been increasingly formative since then. And both polytheism and animism have become more explicit and evident among the many varieties of Paganism.

The more poetic assertion that Paganism is a “religion at home on Earth” is ok as an attention grabber. But it might support the accusation made by some of my scholarly peers that this is activism or even theology rather than a proper study of religion analysis. It needs nuancing, at least. But it works in the same way that a claim that Christianity is a “religion of salvation” might. That is, it highlights a theme given significant attention both as common-ground and boundary marker for adherents in all varieties of Christianity. The key words are used by many kinds of Pagan (or Christian) but not always in the same ways.

So, as you say, there are paradoxes within the plurality and diversity – not only of my pres- entation but also within Pagan self-representation and practice. This is most certainly not a systematized religion. Even those Pagans who write books and run workshops know that they are addressing a community resistant to systematization. And then there’s the tension between local and global. This is a complex one. Sometimes it is only a matter of emphasis. Some celebrations are entirely focused on “this place”, a particular ancient circle or wood- land, a bioregion or watershed. But reports about these can be used deliberately to encourage others to locate themselves more firmly in other places. Similarly, a festival cycle originating in northwest Europe – with its four seasons and agricultural rhythms – can be adapted in totally different ecologies. I’m not convinced that these adaptations are always successful. In the many places which do not have four seasons, for instance, some of the possibilities of the cycle cannot be as productive as they might otherwise be.
Nonetheless, Pagans are creative and hardly ever sectarian about their still emerging tradition. I’ve often referred to a moment in one festival in which the ritual sharing of harvested foods was clearly taken to mean different things to different participants. For some, thanks were being given to grain producing plants. For others, the important harvest was that of having achieved ambitions “planted” in a spring festival. Some participants might have fused both emphases. Similarly, deities from different pantheons were named with no contest between radical polytheists, atheists, animists, or those for whom deities are psychological symbols or archetypes.

I’m not sure these tolerant traditions are only drawn from Modernity’s liberalism. In some Pagan gatherings I have asserted that there’s too much “Protestantism” among Pagans – e.g., an individualized and interiorized notion of selfhood. Nonetheless, there are plenty of examples of tolerant freedoms among Indigenous people. Ancestral traditions are often (but not always) exemplary and inspirational rather than legally binding. Visions are personal even if they require validation by elders and communities. I think it could be argued that Paganism is a meeting place in which thoroughly European Enlightenment inspirations meet indigenizing possibilities. That tension is, I think, exciting – or will be if Pagans contest Modernity more than some do right now!

Adrián Navigante: Let’s go back to an aspect of the first question: Pagans always refer to a distant past that they intend to “reenact” in some way or another, whether they take that connection to be actual, symbolical, or indigenously minded². Whether it is a lineage of witches from the time of the Inquisition, Iron-Age Druids, an ancient Goddess cult going back to the dawn of Europe or the Runic system of divination, such referents have the function of rendering contemporary attempts more solid, meaningful, and consistent. But there is more than mere legitimation. On the one hand, such efforts to get hold of a perennial source reveal a typically anti-modern attitude. The adepts’ search for support in the past (tradition) appears as a critique of the meager possibilities offered by the present system of institutionalized religions (including secular ones) to such attitudes and behaviors. On the other hand, contemporary Pagans seem to cope relatively well with modernity and its discontents, meaning the highly scientized and technocratic society in which we live. Do you see such gestures of past legiti- mation as a reaction to present circumstances, as a way of subverting mainstream dominant intellectual tendencies (in which such referents have no place whatsoever), or as something totally different from such assumptions?

Graham Harvey: I think that references to the past are more nuanced than they once were. This is partly because, as I’ve said, Ronald Hutton’s work has been so well received – so the vast majority of Pagans have a better sense of actual histories. At the same time, Pagans are not only voracious consumers of scholarly work from many disciplines but have also been highly involved in the growth of academic Pagan Studies. So, the re-enactment aspects are now attuned to better scholarship than that which inspired the founders of key movements in the early to mid-twentieth century. At the same time, and for similar reasons, Pagans have become more confident about the relevance, value and successes of their ideas and practices today.
I’m intrigued that you see efforts to get hold of a perennial source “anti-modern”. I think of it as typically Protestant! The assertion that a particular way of being Christian or doing Christianity is truer to the early Church or to the first followers of Jesus seems such a common refrain. Even the dislike of institutionalization fits firmly with Protestant rhetoric – especially in its noncon- formist branches – with regular efforts to distinguish real Christianity from “Churchianity”.

But all of this is mixed, somewhat uneasily, with elements of subversion. For one simple, and not too radical an example: it is somewhat surprising that Paganism is so much about ritual. Indeed, rituals are the common ground on which Pagans meet, the arena in which they recognize each other. This is odd because centuries of religious polemic and persecution has firmly fixed an association between ritual and willful ignorance or folly in British English. We identity “mere ritual” with “vain repetition”, and contrast ritual with proper understanding and sincerely held beliefs (mind you, the media sometimes use “academic” to mean “irrele- vant” or “meaningless” too.) And yet, Pagans make ritual their central practice. Not teaching or publishing – though books, magazines, blogs, and websites proliferate.

I’m not suggesting that Pagans are always brilliant ritualists. That would be remarkable given the prevailing anti-ritual legacy. They are often too individualistic (again, too Modern) to do ritual well. But here’s the thing: when Pagans protest against destructive construction and consumption industries (e.g., road building and fossil fuel use), they do dramatic and colorful rituals as well as petitions and direct action. They demonstrate reverence for the larger-than- human world at the same time that they challenge the obscenities of Modernity.

I am increasingly convinced that Paganism is among the many movements world-wide that are trying to re-make what the Zapatistas call a “world in which many worlds are possible”. This has led me to quote Arturo Escobar’s words (in his Pluriversal Politics)³ in a number of Pagan gatherings recently, knowing that they will be recognised and enthusiastically welcomed):
“Those who still insist on the path of development and modernity are either suicidal, or at the least, ecocidal, and without question they are historical anachronisms. By contrast, those who defend place, territory, and the Earth are neither romantics nor ‘infantile.’ They represent the cutting edge of thought, for they are attuned to the Earth and to justice, and they understand the central issue of our historical moment: the transitions to other models for living, towards a pluriverse of worlds. … [And quoting indigenous, peasant and Afrodescendant activists:] ‘What’s possible has already been done; now let’s go for the impossible’” (pp.44-45).

Some Pagans get this and enact it more than others. But key themes among all kinds of Paganism are in tune with these ambitions, particularly meeting in acts of thanksgiving to the larger-than-human world.

Adrián Navigante: When you come to speak of the relationship between “Pagans”, “Shamanism” and “New Age”, your book adopts a clearly critical note (which you avoid in your description of different “Paganisms”). In Chapter 7, you use the term “Neo-shamanism” to refer to a nostalgic attitude which “[has] reduced shamanism to its lowest common denom- inator” (p. 106). When it comes to evaluating the link between Paganism and New Age, you don’t seem to ascribe a positive value to what Pagans took from New Agers: an individualistic, psychologized, and universalistic approach in which the embodied human is stripped away and a return to pure spirit is preached (cf. p. 117). Do you think that the Gnostic (i.e., its incli- nation to an individualistic soteriology) bent of New Age and the European spiritualization of shamanism are in a way blocking an authentically subversive action, that is, ecologically minded attempts to de-objectify (i.e., “re-sacralize”) Nature in the context of hyper-industri- alism, massive deforestation, and biodiversity loss?

Graham Harvey: You are right: I’ve never managed to be as objective as some colleagues about New Age and neo-shamanism! Yes, there’s a polemic here. One I caught from the people I liked when I first encountered Pagans. But also one that has become more entrenched when I have contemplated the evolution of religion in Modernity.
Briefly put, I see the processes that formed and developed the Peace of Westphalia (1648) as enforcing the individualization and interiorization of religion. The Westphalian settlement that defines Modernity’s Nation States requires citizens to restrict transnational allegiances. So, any religious commitment that links someone to a foreign State is suspect and its public perfor- mance has become known as extremism. Religion, in this context, must be solely a matter of individual belief and kept separate from the requirements of politics and citizenship. Religion, in other words, has become a hobby.

The end result of that trajectory is “spirituality” as such matters are labelled. Protestantism led the way by asking people to believe rather than ritualize. Not that anyone actually stopped ritualizing – but that could never be celebrated. The extreme individuality of New Age and the extreme interiority of neo-shamanism (or core-shamanism) exemplify the further reach of this trajectory. It is evident in the contrast Davi Kopenawa Yanomami makes in his challenging assertion that “white people do not become shamans”⁴. They dream about themselves, and they do not practice the necessary purifications (diets and so on). There’s a lot in this – and clearly Kopenawa wants “white people” to live differently.

More positively, I agree entirely with those who have said that New Age and neo-shamanism (with and beyond Paganism) are necessary therapies to aid people to live as individuals in Modernity with some degree of sanity. However, yes, I see them as blocks against the subver- sive actions that must, eventually, contest the prevailing dominant culture.
larger-than-human world.

Adrián Navigante: In the chapter you devote to the question of “Magic”, you refer to esoteric Kabbalah, the Golden Dawn and the left-hand magic(k) of Crowleans, as well as to Chaos and Eco-Magic. With exception of Eco Magic, we are confronted with a rich landscape of esoteric undercurrents in Western modernity whose values were not those of mainstream society. However, the esoteric currents or movements which contained Pagan elements or even preached their own return to Paganism did not ascribe any significant role to “Nature” – not at least with the semantic implications of today, which go from interconnectedness of beings and living systems to vegetal and animal intelligence. Aleister Crowley’s “paganism” emanated from the imaginary construction of Egypt in XIX century esotericism; Kenneth Grant’s chthonic inclination was related more to the demonology of grimoires and gothic arts than to an earth(ly) philosophy. How would you connect the (urban and mainly scripturally based) esoteric and occult traditions of magic with your notion of a nature-related and orally transmitted Paganism?

Graham Harvey: When I wrote that chapter, I knew less about esotericists and magi- cians than I ought to have done. I knew and still know less about them than I would if I were to re-write the chapter properly. However, I have learnt from some respected friends in that world that they read Crowley and others as celebrating the “natural world” and bodies. They say Crowley was both an esotericist and a Romantic.

Certainly, some the Pagan esotericists I have come to know (members of key groups and publishers of key texts) are enthusiastic participants in ecological and celebratory activities. The textual traditions that they value are among the inspirations for self-knowledges that are as thoroughly relational as the ethnographic texts that many self-identified animist Pagans value.
It is, perhaps, also worth noting that Gerald Gardner and Ross Nichols (founders of particular Pagan movements) fused esotericism with naturist and naturalist (i.e. nudist and ruralist) interests and practices. Indeed, I’m not entirely sure that “nature” is not itself an esoteric inven- tion – certainly its Pagan inflection is entangled with Romanticism.

Adrián Navigante: There is a chapter in your book that particularly caught my atten- tion: “Heathens”. All the other chapters contain what may be called manifestations of Paganism (Celebrating the Seasons, Earth Mysteries) or related but clearly distinguishable concepts (Magic, Witchcraft, Shamanism), but when it comes to Heathenry, we seem to be located exactly within the same cosmological, historical, and anthropological complex as Paganism. You present Heathenry as a local variant of Paganism related to a specifically Germanic and Scandinavian ancestry, and you briefly mention a term which for me is one of the main reasons why the use of this term has become problematic, at least in German-speaking countries: race. The association between heidnisch and völkisch, between Heidentum and Blut und Boden ideology cannot be erased or even minimized in the German context, however fragmented (and in a way superficial) the Nazi use of Heathen traditions might have been – as you say referring to the instrumentalization of the Runes by Guido von List and Teutonic mythology (via Wagner). This problematic also points to the difficulty of make a homogeneous category out of Heathenry – since I don’t think that in the English-speaking world Heathens carry the same “weight of history” upon their shoulders. In any case, I would like to know how the organized Heathen groups you researched stand with regard to this problematic – according to their linguistic and cultural provenance.

The extreme individuality of New Age and the extreme interiority of neo-shamanism (or core-shamanism) exemplify the further reach of Moder- nity on issues related to spirituality

Graham Harvey: Identity politics has made the matter of “race” more difficult. On the one hand, Heathens and those who don’t use that label but are attracted by Germanic, Scandi- navian and Anglo-Saxon traditions are completely aware of the problems. On the other hand, increasing claims to be “indigenous” by Europeans (in Europe or in Euro-settler-colonies) make decolonization and anti-colonialism more difficult. But these are recognized and debated matters.

I spent some time with organized Heathen groups – mostly English-speaking groups in Britain, but I also corresponded with representatives of groups in North America. Some of them were avowedly “racial” – a term that really doesn’t mask their racism. They asserted, for instance, that each “race” has ancestral traditions to which people should affiliate. At one event, an indi- vidual displaying Nazi insignia and making Nazi salutes was escorted out of the building. But it was far from clear that anyone would have objected to him doing these things in less public contexts. Happily, I have spent more time at events hosted by groups which are welcoming of anyone, openly anti-racist and anti-fascist.

A range of other identity claims and practices made such groups similarly distinguishable. When I was told that “political correctness can go too far” I asked the leaders of one group where it begin in their movement. They laughed as they admitted (seemingly with pride) that they had no room for LGBT people or for women in leadership roles. Another group insisted that the Aesir and Vanir deities were not consistently heterosexual or patriarchal. They expressed dislike of the idea that a deity could only be encountered by or manifest in humans of the same ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age and so on.

Some of these conversations were more than uneasy – indeed, a threat of danger in some contexts made me reluctant to pursue them. The burden of responding to the “weight of history” has not diminished. But there are many Heathens who insist that a longer reach of history (i.e., beyond the invention of the category of “race”) contains far more positive inspira- tions than negative ones.

II – FOOD, SEX AND STRANGERS

Adrián Navigante: Just as you define Paganism as “embodied religion” and “religion of the Earth”, your view of religion in Food, Sex and Strangers (2013)⁵ emphasizes the “materiality” of religious experiences and practices. Religion, your write in that book, is not about belief in God or about a transcendent sphere cut off from the senses, the imagination, and the practices of everyday life. It is on the contrary deeply embedded in a relational field of humans and other-than-humans where seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching are an essential part of that net of relations. Is this position a reaction against centuries of dominance by monothe- istic creeds in the West, especially in the face of the ecological crisis we are going through? Is your modus operandi in any way guided by a will to “expand”, or rather “democratize” the notion of religion by displacing it away from the dominant conceptual pair “theology-exe- gesis”?

Graham Harvey: Certainly, I’m committed to an approach to religion and religions that contrasts itself with theology. But I have become increasingly bored by efforts to challenge the dominance of what is called the “World Religions Paradigm”. The paradigm presents religions as more-or-less like Protestant Christian theological systems. It generates books in which the founders and foundational texts of religions are definitive, and the actual lives of religious participants involves more-or-less understanding, commitment, and adherence to those struc- ture. The problem faced in challenging this dominant narrative is that people want us to start with “basic facts” (five things Christians believe, eight things Jews do, four things Muslims agree on, eighteen main deities among Indigenous traditionalists). After that, you’ve lost. The foundations are wrong. We need to start elsewhere. And that elsewhere is a place in which Christians are also wrongly presented in the “World Religions Paradigm”. Similarly, rejecting the Paradigm does not mean adding more religions to the list. Instead, it will require new textbooks to enable the study of even the religions in that elite club to begin and end with lived realities.

Obviously, I’ve just started my reply with the problem again! In Food, Sex and Strangers I wanted to start “elsewhere” – so I began with some exercises to help readers re-shape habits of learning and interacting. And then I use a range of ethnographic encounters to indicate some possible alternative ways in which “religion” might be considered and debated. All of these engage with the sensuality, relationality and performance of religion – i.e. the “doing” of religion in everyday as well as dramatic contexts.

Adrián Navigante: Apart from a perceptible critique of Christian (especially Protestant) theology, the idea of “religion” you develop in your book – to a great extent based on ethno- logical discourses on non-Western cultures – expresses a critical attitude toward the modern notion of individual selfhood and the secularized world left to us after the Enlightenment. It seems that, in your view, the process of modernity has progressively isolated humans from the much broader context of living beings in which they are embedded and has re-shaped nature according to a criterion of objectivation and quantification that has ended up eroding every “respectful form of relation” toward the living world. Do you see a continuity between the ideology of monotheisms (in which God is separated from nature and human beings re-de- fined in relation to the divine transcendence), and that of Enlightenment (in which the triumph of reason ended up placing the human on the level of the divine and getting rid even of that radical and almost unachievable transcendence)?

Graham Harvey: Yes, I have come to understand Modernity as a world-making project increasingly separating humans from the rest of the community. Indeed, I think it is a human separatist movement that inculcates a particular (and particularly bad) relationship with our other-than-human kin. That is, we are taught (in many ways) not to recognize others as kin but as objects. We end up as consumers of objects. That’s the current form of Modernity’s individual.

The ‘imitation of their transcendent God’ continues to tempt some Christians to find bodies, senses, and location problematic. And the European Enlightenment expanded that ‘imitation’ by fantasizing the possibility of universal truths and objective knowledge.

I don’t think this is a necessary or obvious result of monotheism. Nor do I think there’s a necessary continuity between monotheism and Modernity’s project. Monotheists can contest human difference from others. It is possible to read the Hebrew Bible, for example, animistically – as Mari Joerstad does⁶. Monotheists of many kinds often challenge the shaping of relational persons into consumers. However, some dominant kinds of Christian monotheism (especially those complicit with or acquiescent to the privatization of religion) do proffer a temptation towards human separatism. I think this would surprise Medieval Christians, among others. Certainly, however, the “imitation of [their transcendent] God” continues to tempt some Christians to find bodies, senses, and location problematic. And the European Enlightenment expanded that “imitation” by fantasizing the possibility of universal truths and objective knowledge.

In contrast, I wanted to think about religion as an aspect of the relationships we humans have with the larger-than-human world. We have terms like politics, economics, catering, sport and so on for some of those relationships. Where might we find religion if it isn’t only in private beliefs about a transcendent deity? I think we might want to discuss the implication that because humans aren’t unique, while religion is a human phenomenon, it is not only that. But it is challenging enough to begin with the question of what aspect of our inherent relationality “religion” might label.

Adrián Navigante: As I said above, your idea of religion is deeply influenced by ethnology, not only the ethnology of distant cultures but also the critical ethnology of our own cultural expressions and their deep-rooted ideological motivations. Irving Hallowell’s ethnog- raphy of the Ojibwa has been very important for you, as you yourself acknowledge in the preface to your book. His research work is one of the first examples in which ethnology refuses to “scientifically objectify” the others and adopts instead an attitude of respect and a dialogical openness toward the others’ exercise of “interspecies relationality” (that phrase being your programmatic definition of religion). Bruno Latour’s systematic attempt at symmetrization of cultures through a critique of the ideological conflation of “epistemological objectivity and “neutral point of view on reality” that has taken place in the West since we declared ourselves “modern” is something you avail yourself of, for example when you write: “In truth, there has never been a pure modernity, so we have never been completely modern. We have, however, been trying rather hard” (p. 199). Could you elaborate on the importance of Hallowell and Latour in your own thought and on the importance of their work for the present global context?

Graham Harvey: I first encountered Hallowell’s article about Ojibwa ontology after I’d become interested in contemporary Indigenous animism. That followed a powerful moment when an eagle flew a perfect circle around a drum group at the end of a powwow that contrib- uted to the revitalization of the Mi’kmaq community in Newfoundland. I’d experienced similar inter-species interactions among Pagans but wanted to know how Indigenous communities understood and celebrated them. In the context of further research among Pagans, I had an opportunity to visit another Ojibwe community than the one Hallowell writes about. Ojibwa and Ojibwe are just two of the ways related people name themselves – and many prefer a version of the name Anishinaabe.
I’m not sure who introduced me to Hallowell’s work – or whether it was before or after I read Nurit Bird-David’s “re-visitation” to the term “animism”⁷. But it was revelatory and inspira- tional. As you say, Hallowell insisted on respect and dialogue, and therefore opened up the possibility of changing the terms of inter-cultural conversations and research. Although he certainly sought to explain how animism makes sense in the Anishinaabe world, Hallowell raised the possibility of asking how Modernity’s project of de-animation makes any sense. Tim Ingold and others have taken up that question.

It was, however, Hallowell’s report and reflections on an elder’s enigmatic response to a ques- tion about the aliveness of stones (“some are”) that has been most productive for me and others. The key here is not a generalized theory of animacy or of relationality – provocative as those might be – but a specific concern with improving relationships across species boundaries.
And this might explain why Bruno Latour’s work has also inspired me. He was certainly not the first scholar to challenge human exceptionalism or the veracity of Modernist ontological explanations. His contributions to Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Science and Technology Studies (STS) were in conversation with a host of others – some more explicitly that others. Equally, much of what he wrote about ontology and social relations beyond the merely human purview of much of what passes for Social Sciences was entirely obvious to many Indigenous people. The inspiration of Davi Kopenawa, mediated by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is recog- nizable (if inadequately referenced) in Latour’s work.

Nonetheless, if one phrase from Hallowell’s writing stands out (“some are”), so one phrase in Latour’s work speaks volumes. That is the title of his book We have never been modern. What, then, have we been? How have we deluded ourselves? Why do we try so hard to be (more) Modern? Why are our universities still structured on Modernity’s separation of humans from others? In short, Latour’s work introduced me to an explosion of work that reconfigures Western scholarship about relations and relationality.

Adrián Navigante: Another main inspiration for your book, which you explicitly mention in the sixth chapter, has been Te Pakaka Tawhai’s article on Māori religion, which you included in a volume you edited in 2002 on Indigenous religions⁸. Apart from an open recognition of Tawhai’s contribution to the understanding of Māori religion, you rely mainly on a phrase in his article whose validity is not reduced to the Māori setting: the purpose of religious activity is to do violence with impunity. Your comment on this phrase deserves to be quoted: “I found myself wondering whether Tawhai’s statement […] applies to religious activi- ties elsewhere. Perhaps it may even be true of religious activities everywhere” (p. 99). There are many ways of interpreting Tawhai’s phrase. You emphasize the relational, performative, and worldly aspect of it: religion is not about redemption and salvation, or praise and thanksgiving, but rather about permission and placation, an interplay of desires and fears, an exercise of diplomacy to reduce antipathies and hostilities in one’s own relational field. This means that the relational field, even in its healthy manifestations, implies destruction and predation, and the best we can do is to become profoundly aware of the degree of predation we need to exercise so as not to overstep it. I tend to think that performative sacralization (for example the mechanics of sacrifice) is a way of steering that economy of violence. But if I am right in reading you like that, there remains one point that baffles me. Christianity, or at least the Western reception of the New Testament, does not think this way. On the contrary, its message is the end of the economy of violence, and the conviction that the consequence of violent acts is more violence. What are the reasons that lead you to affirm that Tawhai’s phrase applies to religious activities everywhere?

Enslavement and genocide were justifiable – if not to all – as methods for expanding the Christian economy and ecology

Graham Harvey: Briefly and provocatively put: who do they think they are kidding? It is too abundantly clear to many people that Christianity has never rejected the economy of violence. The conquest of what has become the Americas, for instance, was founded on explicit assertions of the need to commit violence to civilize savages. Enslavement and genocide were
justifiable – if not to all – as methods for expanding the Christian economy and ecology.
But, more positively, the saying of grace before meals, and the regular celebration of the “sacrifice of the mass” suggest (at least, or at least to me) that Tawhai’s phrase might be analytically powerful in Christian and other contexts.

However, the core reason for my thinking affirming the applicability of Tawhai’s phrase else- where is that everybody (human or otherwise) needs to consume others and needs to justify it somehow. I know, of course, that it is entirely possible to predate and consume others without conducting rituals and without respect. Our extractivist culture makes that painfully clear. So, I am being deliberately provocative. My point is really that the academic study of religions has deployed an entirely Protestant Christian obsession with “belief in God” as if that were defini- tive of all religions. As it doesn’t work (because both “belief” and “God” are not concerns in all religions), what happens if we start elsewhere? And Tawhai’s phrase has the immense benefit of raising questions about food, sex and strangers in interestingly multi-species ways.

Adrián Navigante: That the works of Hallowell, Latour and Tawhai have influenced your understanding of religion in terms of material, embodied and performative relationality between humans and non-humans, should not surprise your readers. But there is another figure that in my opinion plays an important role, contrary to most people’s expectations: Charles Darwin. He belongs, together with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, to the stronghold of crit- ical modernity (which rejects religion of any denomination and kind). His materialist ontology does not seem at all to have room for the kind of subjectivation of non-humans that is to be found in some non-Western religious systems and the “indigenous epistemologies” inherent to them – nowadays becoming ostensible due to the so-called ontological turn in anthropology. Darwin’s evolution theory is built upon a complex mechanics of adaptation to change and local circumstances; his main concepts like “environment” and “organism” do not point to intersub- jective socialization but rather to a biomechanical and non-directional pattern of change; intel- ligence is an evolutionary accident only reserved to humans.

However, in some ways that I fail to grasp, Darwin’s position comes for you very close to what you thematize in your book from the perspective of non-Western forms of religiosity. The real world we inhabit, you write in the first chapter, “is the world of Darwinian evolving relationality” (p. 4). In the fifth chapter you bring into the discussion Darwin’s tree of life as an element that “frees us from the fantasy that the cosmos was designed for us” (p. 82). In the seventh chapter, Darwin appears as an interme- diate instance between the fully relational world of animism and the fully atomized world of modern science, since “he has revealed [that the world is] purely relational” (p. 126). Finally, in the last chapter you go so far as to say: “we have failed to follow Darwin into a vibrantly relational world” (p. 203). Could you explain the place of Darwin in your own elaboration and in your (new) understanding of religion?

Graham Harvey: I suspect I have reduced Darwin to the author of a catch-phrase or slogan. And I certainly haven’t engaged with him in a thorough manner – but I love his experi- ments with earthworms. I think I was only trying to say that evolution is all about relationality and never about separatism or exceptionalism (human or otherwise). It is an aspect of our kinship with the rest of the world – and especially with those with whom we still co-evolve, such as bacteria. My use or abuse of Darwin is meant to aid those who think animism is an alien notion to realize that they probably have no trouble with various aspects of relationality.

Adrián Navigante: To conclude this part of the interview, I will go back to your title: Food, Sex and Strangers. The first word, “food”, points to the necessity and the implications of killing for one’s own survival. Religion appears as a mechanism through which the exercise of that violence is rendered impure – not only from a moral point of view, but also from the point of view of soul predation and its consequences. “Sex” appears as an instance of intimacy, like food: the ones with whom we share that intimacy are those familiar to us, the others are “strangers”. Now, in a religious context this delimitation goes beyond merely human inter- action. People share food (and even sexual intimacy) with gods, animals, and different sorts of spirits. Could we say, bearing in mind all these factors, that the materiality you emphasize in the study of religion – religion as something we can see, smell, hear, taste or touch – is profoundly animistic, and that the more “material” we become, the more re-enchanted we render the world?

Graham Harvey: Exactly! Once we reject the fantasy that “material” means “inert” (or any of the things implied there – possibly lack of agency but certainly lack of concern or desire), we find that our materiality links us to a world full of kin and of wonder. Classic currents in phenomenology, in environmental writing (poetry as well as academic texts), and in multiple Indigenous novels, make this link between sensing bodies and the sensual world evident. They encourage that enchantment (which has never been completely crushed). But here are inspirational words from David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous⁹ (which I ought to have quoted more often): “Magic [synonymous here with enchantment and animism], then, in its perhaps most primor- dial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives – from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of glass itself – is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own.” (pp. 9-10).

III. ANIMISM: RESPECTING THE LIVING WORLD

Adrián Navigante: Your book Animism: Respecting the Living World, published for the first time in 2005, with two revised and updated reeditions (2017 and 2019)¹⁰, is the result of a very ambitious project. It aims to cover the history of animism and elucidate the very important change in the Western reception of the concept, but it also contains “case studies” (from Ojibwa and Māori to Eco-Pagan Activism in Europe), anthropological and philosoph- ical issues (shamans, spirits, personhood, etc.) and a program for the future (the challenges of animism in the contemporary global situation). You deal with very important and complex issues in the book on which we can barely scratch the surface in this interview, but I will try to point to some of them. The framework of your historical reconstruction of animism can be summarized in the two kinds of animism you define at the beginning of the book, which are the opposite poles of the histor- ical spectrum you problematize. The first one, related to Edward B. Tylor’s position in Primitive Culture (1871), is “belief in spirits or non-empirical beings”, and it presup- poses a cognitive error on the part of “primitives” as to the nature of reality – which will be corrected by modern epistemology. The second is “concern with knowing how to behave appropriately towards persons, not all of whom are human” (Preface, p. xvii). The first definition is epistemological and presupposes an evolutionary theory of human thought from its animistic origins to secular science, the second is strictly ethnological and demands a generous degree of cultural relativism to deal with different frameworks of experience and social organization in their own inherent consistency. However, they are not strictly separated in your book. Your definition of the new kind of animism implies the acceptance of a new epis- temology which radically inverts Tylor’s main conviction (that of XIX century anthropology of religion) expressed in the following quotation: “The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower races. Men to whom the cries of beasts and birds seem like human language, and their actions guided as it were by human thoughts, logically enough allow the existence of souls of beasts, birds, and reptiles, as to men. The lower psychology cannot but recognize in beasts the very characteristics which it attributes to the human soul, namely, the phenomena of life and death, will and judgement, and the phantom seen in vision or in dream” (Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol.1, Cambridge 2010, p. 423). My question is whether this epistemology, which stems from the observation and study of other cultures, should in your opinion be symmetricized to the point of saying that is it not “the primitives” but “us moderns” who “got it all wrong”. In other words: Should the ethnological revision and correction of old prejudices be carried out to the point of adopting certain criteria – like shamanic interactions with non-humans or the synchronic environmental logic of oracular divination – as epistemological challenges for our own worldview and mode of behavior?

Graham Harvey: The short answer is an unequivocal “yes! we have got it all wrong”. We have worked remarkably hard to become Moderns. Happily, we have not completely succeeded – and, indeed, cannot. We are constituted by our co-evolution within multi-species communities. We are symbiotic with other kin. We have tried to be individuals, autonomous subjects, but can only do so by ignoring all the evidence of our inherent relationality. And here I do not only mean the evidence from ethnographies about Indigenous peoples, nor that from Indigenous educators. I mean the results of “Western” scientific observation and experimen- tation. We are not merely hosts of good and bad bacteria. Rather, they are among the parts of what makes me a “we”: a continuous interaction of beings, “persons, most of whom are not human, but all of whom deserve respect” (to quote myself). They are part of what makes us “dividuals” in Marilyn Strathern’s sense.
And, to your point, yes, our currently, entrained, and entrenched standard methods for observing and learning about other-than-human beings are insufficient for learning among and from them. Since we misunderstand ourselves (e.g., imagining ourselves to have unique cognitive abilities), we are unlikely to be able to adapt our criteria and practices to help us hear those others. There are efforts in this direction – e.g., by scholars within the ANT and STS camps. Vinciane Despret’s What would animals say if we asked the right questions (2016)¹¹ is an excellent example. But shamans and diviners do not only ask good questions; they listen and watch (and otherwise sense) for generous communications initiated by others. They open themselves to what others might wish to say. They inherit, test, and improve methods for knowing whether members of other species are ready and willing to address, educate and/or celebrate with us. In particular, shamans and diviners gain expertise to know that they are ignorant and fragile, needing advice and guidance. They share with their (human) communities a notion that other beings might be persuaded to help. Some do so by enabling visions and other powerful experi- ences of engagement with the larger world.

I think I can say that now that we know that the world is a made of diverse multi-species communities, full of communicative possibilities, scholars and all of us (Indigenous or recov- ering-Moderns alike) need to experiment with the kind of knowledge methods Tylor and co denigrated. And this is beyond urgent in this world so badly damaged and endangered by the pursuit of human separatism and consumerism.

Adrián Navigante: You take seriously Irving Hallowell’s re-definition of “truly objective research” which introduces two changes in the way ethnologists were supposed to deal with their object of field study. A dialogical narrative of participation instead of a monological and distanced description of the indigenous communities in question, and – even more challenging
– the extension of that “dialogue” toward the other-than-human members of those communi- ties. In the preface you declare these two aspects to be the foundations of your book: “a dialog- ical methodology and an understanding of what the term ‘person’ means” (p. xxi). Two ques- tions come to mind in reflecting on this matter: Do you think that a Western ethnologist can not only try to grasp an animistic setting but also act as an animist within the community he is researching if he engages in a true dialogue with its human members (and if so, which were the parameters of this dialogue?) Would the extension of the dialogue to the other-than-human members imply a radical modification of the way in which the ethnologist should behave to keep his research going? I am thinking, with regard to this second question, of Bruce Albert’s and Davi Kopenawa’s dialogue, in which the ethnology of the “invisible beings of the forest” (xapiri pë) was carried out by the shaman, and on the position of some other – less conventional or official – anthropologists who say that the “ontological shock” caused by the ingestion of some plants in local contexts results in a kind of “wild shamanization of the anthropologist” (if you allow me this parody of the Bastidian notion of mystique sauvage).

Graham Harvey: Indeed, we need more dialogue, more dialogical methods and dialog- ical narratives. When I was transitioning from being a scholar of ancient texts to one intrigued by contemporary lived religions, I was told many times that research could only be respectful if scholars were ready to be changed and willing to benefit their hosts in some way. In recent years there has been a lot of talk about decolonizing the academy. As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012) have said powerfully: decolonization is not a metaphor¹². But clearly it is just and only that in many academic contexts. Neo-liberal university managers certainly do not want anything radical to happen. Decolonization will not be complete when Indigenous knowledges and ontologies are included in curricula. It is not over because we can publish books proposing that we have never been Modern or demonstrating that we have, despite everything, remained kin. Decolonization must be about learning other ways to know. It must result in the rejection of the distinction between “natural” and “human” sciences founded on the faulty and destruc- tive nature/culture divide. Perhaps this end can be reached for by acknowledging that far from promoting universal knowledge, the academy has elevated one local knowledge against all others.

I should have said much earlier that there is no single “Indigenous knowledge”, epistemology or ontology, just as there are multiple Indigenous communities. These too are local knowl- edges – but many with perspectives and applications that can be extended internationally or even globally. So, just as Indigenous knowledges have been tested over generations, they can be experimented with, in dialogue, to see how they might aid the challenges of the contempo- rary world. This, I think, is part of what the Zapatistas and scholars like Arturo Escobar mean by “the world in which many worlds are possible”¹³.

So, to your question, “can a Western ethnographer act as an animist?” I see no reason why not. And many reasons why we should. Again, if we’ve never ceased being kin, we can learn locally appropriate etiquette for dialogues with our hosts. We will have to learn to acknowledge our ignorance and even foolishness in not already knowing what is obvious in many communi- ties. I don’t think foolishness is a rare feeling for ethnographers but admitting it and seeing it through might require some adjustment.
Regarding your reference to Bruce Albert’s and Davi Kopenawa’s dialogue and to those who’ve experienced the “ontological shock” leading to the “wild shamanization of the anthropologist” indicate, some knowledge methods might be hard to get past a university ethics committee. Nonetheless, there are elders, shamans, plants, and fungi ready to help scholars re-engage with the larger-than-human community. And there is a community that might (after testing us) be ready of that re-engagement.

Adrián Navigante: Let’s plunge into what you consider the main notion of the new kind of animism: personhood. The methodological potential of this concept lies in the extension of the field of “social relations” from the merely human to the other-than-human world. The implications of this extension not only differ from the Christian notion of person (which privi- leges humans as imago Dei and a specific notion of the divine ontologically discontinuous with the whole natural world – and even hostile to its Pagan deities), but also from the modern idea of person (in terms of intentional subjectivity endowed with rationality and moral values). In an animistic setting, relations are not only interaction of organisms or adaptation patterns. If we take the ethnographical literature from different parts of the world seriously, the way in which indigenous groups are said to relate with other-than-human beings is neither instinc- tive nor metaphorical, but a complex social articulation including a myriad of activities such as hunting, eating, having sex, dreaming, performing ritual, and spinning myths – all these activities having a strictly intersubjective sense. In your book one notices a certain caution or ambivalence regarding the extent to which you assume the implications of taking not only ethnographical literature seriously (one does not need to be animist for that) but also the permeability of other modalities of world-configuration into our own – including the language of scholarly reflection. If I may quote you, “Persons are related beings constituted by their many and various interactions with others. Persons are sociable beings who communicate with others. Persons need to be taught by stages what it means to be a person” (p. 18). Readers could easily take such declarations in a metaphorical sense and translate “relations” in terms of biological interaction of organisms, or “sociable” in a behavioristic sense – i. e. dolphins, rats, and bees “socialize” in a way, but – unlike humans – without notion of self or complex brain processes. Such consideration would certainly not encompass the type of knowledge obtained by an Amazonian shaman in the rain forest or concretized in the fabrication of an African power object. I would like to know whether your notion of personhood – derived from that of Irving Hallowell – intends to be a descriptive tool to better account for other – animistic – modalities of relation (where animal or plant spirits are taken as equally subjective as humans), or whether it aims at becoming a critical weapon against the hitherto undisputed validity of the scientific and technical worldview.

Graham Harvey: I really should have written more clearly! I think my only caution or ambivalence was about the possibility of being read as suggesting “this is all easy”. In Indige- nous communities, elders learn to socialize more with practice. They learn by interacting with others – other elders, with tabaco, eagles, rocks, ancestors… The aid of ayahuasca and so on is needed because relational animistic personhood is not a given but an ambition. That is, all beings are necessarily relations of all others. That’s the kind of foundation Darwin’s sketchbook tree of life and “I think” indicates. But even with close human kin – parents and children, or spouses for example – we learn to relate better (hopefully) by each interaction. Put differently: anyone can talk to a tree; it takes time to listen. And, importantly, some of that time might be spent just “being in the presence” until the tree accepts that the “listener” is worth addressing.

Anyone can talk to a tree; it takes time to listen. And, importantly, some of that time might be spent just ‘being in the presence’ until the tree accepts that the “listener” is worth addressing

I have no difficulty asserting that all kinds of persons can and do deliberately interact with others when they wish to. Humans have no distinctive abilities or characteristics – even nega- tively. My suspicion is that, just like humans, lots of other beings wish everyone else would stop being lazy and try harder to understand. That, think, is what happens when the sparrows nesting in our roof eaves shout at us.
So, no, “relations” and “kin” are not poetic metaphors but efforts to both clarify and complexify the notion of personhood. Everything is relational, some relations are closer than others, and all relationships can be improved (or worsened). The challenge is to hear / read these words without thinking that humans (or particular kinds of human) best exemplify them. We are only persons when and as we actively engage with others. Contrary to Monty Python’s Brian we are not individuals. We are relations. All of us. But our ability to relate well requires learning. By all of us, human or hedgehog…

In that vein, the notion of personhood I derive from Hallowell’s learning among the Anishi- naabeg – and from my encounters with other teachers (human or otherwise) – is both about expressing an animist world and about contesting the human exceptionalism of Modernity’s world.

Perhaps that makes it do too much work. Similarly, much as I love Hallowell’s phrase “other- than-human persons” I have found that too many people think it refers to “spirits” rather than “animals”, to metaphysics rather than bodied realities. That remains a challenge.

Adrián Navigante: Following Irving Hallowell and his reflections on Ojibwe discourse, you extend the category of “personhood” or “social agents” to objects like sticks, stones, shells, and kettles. While Hallowell follows linguistic indicators within a specific cultural complex, the question in your book is much broader, so the challenge seems to lie in the task of re-thinking notions like “body” and “selfhood” no longer as existential conditions to produce affects, effects and changes other embodied selves and their environment, but rather as the consequence of a layout or an assemblage of affects and effects configurating relations and ending in subjective formations. You write: “the agency and intentionality of human persons affects objects that are utilized culturally so that these objects become, in some sense, subjects. This may be an opposing move to the one in which ‘enemies’ are de-personalized and dehumanized” (p. 108). I wonder whether this subjectivation of objects that you see in animistic settings has in any way at least an indirect relationship with the “work of art” in modern Western culture. Secularized as it may be, and progressively integrated in a logic of marketing and commodification, there remains a space (from the visionary poetry of William Blake to the magical paintings of Austin Osman Spare or Antonin Artaud’s phonetic alchemy and theater of cruelty) in which objects – including the material body – become not only aesthetically prominent or de-familiarized (as the Russian formalists said) but also sites of a mysterious non-human agency with a person- ality (or many personalities) of their own. Is there in your opinion a form of “animism” that survives through aesthetic subversion and alternative forms of creative or even transgressive imagination in a “de-souled” social setting like our highly urbanized, market-oriented, and technologically dominated society?

Graham Harvey: I continue to struggle with the animacy of things. Perhaps I’m still trapped by the question “are they alive?”. And even the question of whether something needs an experience of selfhood is challenging. But Kiiwiich’s answer to Hallowell’s question about stones is helpful¹⁴. The right question isn’t “are they alive?” but “how is our relationship?” Things (if I can use that word for “made stuff” or artefacts for now) interact with other exist- ences. Art works on us. We are changed by our interactions with glasses, computers, baskets and more. And they are changed too. I’m not sure why I have a problem saying that a cup is kin when I can easily insist that trees are. I’m still working through my struggles with the de-animated Modern ontology and the English language which makes some things hard to say.

But you also challenge me to address the “de-souled” urbanized, market-orientated, techno- logical dominated society. There is certainly a foundational form of animism that has not yet been eradicated by the “world destroying machine” (as Isabelle Stengers calls Modernity)¹⁵. We remain kin whether we know it, acknowledge it, celebrate it or not. If we are not fully Modern, we are at least still partly animistic. But the recognition of our relatedness is not merely descriptive. It has to be resistant to the destruction of life. It must seek to increase the opportunities for more respectful relating.

I am also conscious that there are ways of thinking about “animism” in relation to the oppres- sive actions of technologies. The current obsession with AI re-animates fears that robots will take control. But in many ways, the global addiction to consumerism and acquisition already indicate that we have handed control to our artefacts. Just as our Amazonianist colleagues speak about “dark shamanism” (perhaps what would be called sorcery elsewhere) perhaps we should speak about “dark animism” in relation to the forces that threaten our relational world.

Adrián Navigante: The idea of “respecting the living world” does not imply in itself crossing ontological boundaries or even delving into animistic societies to the point of “being changed” (like Edith Turner in Zambia or Paul Stoller in Niger). Precisely because of this, a watered-down form of “neo-animism”, over-adapted to the individualistic needs of capitalist consumerists, inevitably flourishes and expands itself in the West. Supported by the idea of non-dogmatic attitude and individual freedom, this exoticized variant of animism threatens to superimpose itself over authentic efforts to grasp other modes of relation (doing justice to their specific cultural formations, usually devaluated and oppressed) and decondition our own way of seeing and experiencing the world. Your book deals with cases whose very setting and field of resonance are inevitably faced with this problematic: Eco-Pagan gatherings, festi- vals, communities, and spiritual circles. There is not only the danger of a romanticization of Nature in such initiatives, where real phenomena from animistic settings (from an a-moral interaction with forces to forms of psychological or even physical cannibalism) are banished from the word go, but also a tendency to blend or fuse animistic re-enchantment of the world and commodity fetichism (whose phantom objectivity is, as Michael Taussig says, also a kind of “animated substance”). Do you share this concern of mine? If so, where do you think one should draw the line, and how?

Graham Harvey: Certainly, there is a temptation to romanticize Nature – and not only among Pagans. Perhaps this is a licensed form of Green Washing: astronauts’ photographs of “Gaia” and colourful evocations of “Mother Earth” might do little to contest humanity’s domi- nance of Earth’s life. Rather, they might encourage us to continue thinking we humans are separate from everything else – and can or even should manage the world. But I find the very idea that there is a realm called “Nature” enough of a problem. I’ve been saying recently that if we could stop using the word all sorts of things might be better.

I think we’re only at the beginning of contesting Modernity in its most Modern contexts (univer- sities in particular). While I agree that animism can be subverted or domesticated as another romanticism and/or primitivism, I think what we’re seeing is the continuing emergence of experiments in animistic re-enchantment. If we can reinforce the radical push of these exper- iments in the direction of contesting the “machine” – and not just decorating the edges of busi- ness as usual – I’m hopeful that our shared concerns will be met. That is, this animism has to be decolonizing and truly ecological (collaborating with other humans and other-than-humans in enhancing the well-being of diverse communities).

Adrián Navigante: In your re-evaluation and revalorization of animism, the task of reconfiguring Western epistemologies and ontologies proves to be central, but this does not mean that every proposal of reconfiguration goes in the direction of an “animistic turn”. In the last part of your book, you are concerned with differential notions of embodiment and matter, from post-modern feminist theories to quantum physics. This opens the door to a very complex and in my opinion problematic question: techno-animism. In the volume you edited with Miguel Astor-Aguilera in 2018, Rethinking Relations and Animism¹⁶, you included an essay by Fabio Gygi on this subject, in which the latter refers to techno-animism in Japan in words of Anne Allison: “animating contemporary technology and commodities with spirits and reconfiguring intimate attachments” (p. 94). As I said in my previous question, there are good reasons to distinguish (from a philosophical, historical and anthropological perspective) between forms of animism in non-Western societies and forms of commodity fetichism in Western (or global) capitalism. Which reasons – if any – do you consider in order to rethink, relativize or problematize this distinction?

Graham Harvey: Commodification is, perhaps, the defining characteristic of Modernity and its capitalism and consumerism. In that context, I see the need to rethink our relation- ships not only with technologies as well as with what we might call biotic communities. Part of my struggle with these issues is another linguistic and more-than-linguistic one. How do we retrieve “materialism” from the grasp of the dualisms that separate parts of reality from others? How do we recover a sense that “materials” and “matter” are kin and worthy of coop- erating with? We are still entangled with the commodification of humans and of labor. How will we persuade others that other worlds are possible? I’m hopeful because Indigenous people are increasingly vocal and beginning to be heard in global forums. I’m hopeful that some Pagans, at least, are catching what Robin Kimmerer calls “infectious gratitude” that will infuse renewed efforts at better kinship relations. So, yes, problematize alongside the celebration of life.

Source indications in the first part of the interview refer to the second edition of Graham Harvey’s book Contemporary Paganism. Religions of the Earth from Druids and Witches to Heathens and Ecofeminists, New York 2011. The first edition was published in 1997 under the title Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism.
“The claim that Pagans are reviving ancient pre-Christian religious practices and cultures is less common than it once was but can still be encountered. […] This is a small part of the possibility implied by the terms indigenous and indigenizing” (p. 231)
Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible, translated by David Frye, Durham and London 2020. The original version of Escobar’s book is called Otro Posible es Posible: Caminando hacia las tranci- siones desde Abya Yala/Afro/Latino-América (Bogotá, 2018).
Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of A Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge 2013, p.375.
Source indications from this book refer to the Routledge edition of 2014: Graham Harvey, Food, Sex & Strangers. Understanding Religion as Everyday Life, London and New York. The book was published for the first time in 2013 by Acumen.
Mari Joerstad, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics, Cambridge 2019.
Nurit Bird-David, “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology, in: Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, N° S1, Special Issue Culture – A Second Chance? (February 1999), pp. 67-91.
Graham Harvey (ed.), Readings in Indigenous Religions, London, Continuum, 2002. Tawhai’s article had originally been published in Steward Sutherland and Peter Clarke (ed.), The Study of Religion: Traditional and New Religion, London, Routledge, 1988.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, New York 2017 [first edition 1997].
Source references related to this book in the third part of the interview refer to the 2019 edition published by Hurst & Company (London).
Original in French: Que diraient les animaux si… on leur posait les bonnes questions ? Paris 2012.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is not a metaphor, in: Decolonization: Indigeneity, Educa- tion & Society, Vol.1, N°1, 2012, pp. 1-40.
Cf. supra, footnote 3.
Kiiwiich was an Anishinaabe elder and medicine man, whom Irving Hallowell asked the following question: “Are all the stones we see about us here alive?” (cf. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View”, in: Culture in History, ed. by Stanley Diamond, New York 1960, pp. 19-52).
See Isabelle Stengers’ conversation with Marc Higgins and Maria Wallace “In Conversation with Isabelle Stengers: Ontological Politics in Catastrophic Times”, published in Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene, Vol. 2, ed. by Sara Tolbert, Maria Wallace, Marc Higgins and Jesse Bazzul, Cham 2024.
Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality, edited by Graham Harvey and Miguel Astor Aguilera, London 2020. The following quotation in Adrián Navigante’s question refers to this book.

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