According to a long-established convention, animism is a system of beliefs that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert. But this convention, as I shall show, is misleading on two counts. First, we are dealing here not with a way of believing about the world but with a condition of being in it. This could be described as a condition of being alive to the world, characterised by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in fl ux, never the same from one moment to the next. Animacy, then, is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded. Rather — and this is my second point — it is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire fi eld of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence. The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation.
One man from among the Wemindji Cree, native hunters of northern Canada, offered the following meaning to the ethnographer Colin Scott. Life, he said, is ‘continuous birth’ (Scott 1989: 195). I want to nail that to my door! It goes to the heart of the matter. To elaborate: life in the animic ontology is not an emanation but a generation of being, in a world that is not pre-ordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual (Ingold 2000: 113). One is continually present as witness to that moment, always moving like the crest of a wave, at which the world is about to disclose itself for what it is. In his essay ‘Eye and Mind’ the philosopher Maurice Merleau- Ponty attributed precisely the same kind of sensibility — the same openness to a world-in-formation — to the painter. The painter’s relation to the world, Merleau-Ponty writes, is not a simple ‘physical-optical’ one. That is, he does not gaze upon a world that is fi nite and complete, and proceed to fashion a representation of it. Rather, the relation is one of ‘continued birth’— these are Merleau-Ponty’s very words — as though at every moment the painter opened his eyes to the world for the fi rst time. His vision is not of things in a world, but of things becoming things, and of the world becoming a world (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 167– 68, 181). The painter Paul Klee made much the same point in his Creative Credo of 1920. Art, he famously declared, ‘does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’ (Klee 1961: 76).
The animic world is in perpetual flux, as the beings that participate in it go their various ways. These beings do not exist at locations, they occur along paths. Among the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, for example, as the writer Rudy Wiebe has shown, as soon as a person moves he or she becomes a line. People are known and recognised by the trails they leave behind them. Animals, likewise, are distinguished by characteristic patterns of activity or movement signatures, and to perceive an animal is to witness this activity going on, or to hear it. Thus, to take a couple of examples from Richard Nelson’s wonderful account of the Koyukon of Alaska, Make Prayers to the Raven, you see ‘streaking like a flash of fire through the undergrowth’, not a fox, and ‘perching in the lower branches of spruce trees’, not an owl (Nelson 1983: 108, 158). The names of animals are not nouns but verbs.
- Tim Ingold
