Kinship is the web of relationships through which people count one another as family: by birth, by marriage, and by living, eating and caring together. Animists extend it beyond humans because they experience the animals, plants, stones, rivers and mountains around them as persons who share their life and their origin in Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this, so that wolf is a brother and the river a grandfather. In Therapeutic Shamanism this is a family, not a ladder, in which humans are the youngest of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer and kinship is the ground of respect, empathy and right relationship.
What is kinship? #
In its everyday sense, kinship means who counts as family: parents and children, brothers and sisters, grandparents, cousins, in-laws. Anthropologists have studied it for a century and a half, because every human society organises itself partly through it, deciding who may marry whom, who shares food, who inherits and who owes whom care.
Kinship has never been only a matter of biology. People become kin by adoption, by sharing a name, by eating together and by going through hardship together. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, in What Kinship Is, And Is Not (2013), put it as a “mutuality of being”: kin are people whose lives and fortunes are part of one another’s.1 That definition already points beyond the human, since it is about shared life rather than shared blood.
Why do animists extend kinship beyond humans? #
Because that is how they experience the world. Animist peoples speak of brother wolf and sister eagle, and extend the same family language to the plants, and to what Therapeutic Shamanism calls the Stone People: grandfather river, grandmother mountain. The hunter-gatherers who lived this way saw themselves as one species in a community of species, part of a web of life, belonging to the land and not owning it. The other species were often called brothers or sisters, or ‘the peoples’: the animal people, the plant people and the stone people, all kin to the human people.2
For animists this kinship was never an idea or a principle to live up to. It was something felt, arising from Soul and from Spirit, and it is experienced, not believed.3 It also has a literal side. Looked at from shamanic reality, every individual being is like the tip of a twig on a branch. Each dog grows from Dog, humans, chimpanzees and gorillas converge into Great Ape, and further back still into Mammal, and so on back towards the trunk, all of it part of Mother Earth.4 So the family language describes a real relationship and not only a way of speaking. See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People? and What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Anthropologists have recorded the same family language among hunter-gatherers. The anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, who has worked with the Nayaka of South India, then forest hunter-gatherers and since drawn into wage work and trade, described how they experienced the forest as a giving parent that shares with them as kin share with one another.5
Is it a family or a ladder? #
A family. Animist kinship carries no ranking of beings from higher to lower; it is a round table, not a pyramid. That does not mean everyone is the same age. Hunter-gatherers held that the oldest and wisest of the Peoples are the Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer, then the Plant People, then the Animal People, and last the Human People. This is not about hierarchy but about family. Humans are the youngest and least wise, the children, who need guidance and have a lot to learn.6
Seen this way, the world is full of elder relatives. Every animal, plant and stone has a healing gift and something to teach, and humans are the children of a larger family that cares about them and wants to help, teach and guide them.7 This is the reverse of the myth of human supremacy, which puts humans at the top as the wisest of beings. Knowing themselves to be the youngest, animist ancestors lived with humility, respect and gratitude.
What happened to this kinship? #
It was broken with the coming of totalitarian agriculture and, later, the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer. Hunter-gatherers competed with other species for food, but never set out to wipe out a species; a deliberate war on wolves or bears would have been unthinkable, an abomination.2 With farming, people stopped being children of the earth sharing the land with their non-human relatives and kin, and decided instead that they owned the land and would choose what lived on it.3 From the rise of the city-states onwards, animals and plants came to be treated as things to be used.8
For hunter-gatherers meeting this for the first time, the destruction of forests and the mass slaughter of animals did not look like seeing their kin massacred; it was seeing their kin massacred. There are reports of Native Americans weeping at the slaughter of the buffalo, and of Indigenous people weeping when they first saw ploughs tearing the skin of Mother Earth.3 See What is the Fall? and What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
What did kinship look like among humans? #
Wider than the modern family. The nuclear family is a recent invention, at most a few hundred years old. For most of human history people lived in tribes, among people they knew well, and children were usually raised by all of the adults in a tribe and not only by their biological parents, free to spend time with whichever adults they felt closest to.9 Hunter-gatherer groups tended to stay at a size where everyone could know everyone, and split when they grew too large. See What does Robin Dunbar say about how religion evolved, and how big can a tribe be? and How did hunter-gatherers raise their children?
So kinship among humans and kinship with the other-than-human were of a piece. People who lived as part of a tribe of known relatives also lived as part of a larger family of beings.10
Is kinship with other beings just a way of speaking? #
Some anthropologists think the evidence is more mixed than the phrase ‘everything is kin’ suggests. Ethnographers working in the Amazon, as summarised by the anthropologist Ernst Halbmayer, found that peoples there sort beings by degrees. Matthias Brabec de Mori found that the Shipibo, who live along the Ucayali river in Peru by fishing and growing crops, grade beings by their consciousness, agency and power, and do not count fish as persons at all. Dimitri Karadimas held that there is no direct access to the inner life of another being, so what anthropology can study is how each culture imputes an inner life to animals, not what the animals experience.11
On the other side, the scholar of religion Graham Harvey holds that persons are known in relationship. For him a person is a being who communicates and has a will of their own, whether or not they look or act like a human, and recognising persons is something people learn by relating to them.12 Therapeutic Shamanism rests its own answer on experience. Whether the Peoples are kin is not something to take on faith; it is something people can find out for themselves, through journeying and through time spent with the living world.13
What difference does kinship make to how we live? #
It changes how we treat what is around us, because empathy follows understanding. Psychotherapists have a saying, ‘to judge is to misunderstand’, meaning that when a therapist understands someone from the inside out, judgements tend to fall away. Animist peoples lived alongside the other animals and the plants every day, not as something to visit on a day off, and so understood them, and felt an empathy with them that shaped everything they did. That deep, empathic, reciprocal and respectful relationship is at the heart of animism.
So kinship is where animist ethics come from. Kin are not resources; they are taken from with gratitude and given back to. See What is right relationship and reciprocity?, What does animism say about killing and eating? and What is totemism?
