New Challenges in the Study of Animism: Human–Trees Relations Rediscovered

Colloquium
Eliran Arazi,  Miguel Astor-Aguilera,  Elizabeth Oriel,  Youval Rotman,  Guido Sprenger,  Nurit Stadler  

We address the cultural and socio-religious role of animism by focusing on different forms of human-tree relationship in distinct religious systems. Rather than drawing on explanations that concentrate on human actions, meanings, and interpretations of animism, such as those informed by representational, interpretive, and hermeneutic approaches to human thought and practice, we offer to explore the relationships between humans and those who could be defined as “non-human subjects”. In this panel we offer new approaches to go beyond the “ontological turn” in the study of animism that challenged the category of “subjects” as humans. The ontological turn led scholars to explore the definition of “non-humans” subjects, especially plants and trees, as possessing their own self, mind and immanent agency. We wish to expand on this and examine the ways by which the relationships with them are forged, and the field of interactions between human and vegetal subjects that such relationships open. This will enable to detect the interpersonal dimension that animism establishes between society and the natural environment. Most of the scholarship about animism focused on beliefs in nature spirits as a static system. We wish to go beyond such premise and examine animism as a religious experience which offers opportunities of change. Natural subjects thus function as social agents, which we term here “new challenges in the study of animism”. By forging relationships with trees, we suggest, society opens ways to make its structures dynamic and flexible.