Graham Harvey, born in 1959, is a British scholar of religion and a professor at the Open University, whose book Animism: Respecting the Living World (2005) is the best-known statement of what is called the ‘new animism’. It opens with the definition many people now use, that animists are people who recognise that the world is “full of persons, only some of whom are human”, and that life is always lived in relationship with others. In this newer sense, animism is about how to live respectfully among those persons, not, as the older sense had it, a mistaken ‘belief in spirits’.
Who is Graham Harvey? #
He was born in 1959 and took his doctorate at Newcastle University in 1991, on group identity in ancient Jewish writings. He taught religious studies at Newcastle and then at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, and has been a professor at the Open University since 2003, heading its religious studies department from 2013 to 2017.1
His research covers modern Paganism, indigenous religions and animism. Besides Animism (2005, with a revised second edition in 2017), his books include Listening People, Speaking Earth (1997), on contemporary Paganism, and Food, Sex and Strangers (2013), which treats religion as something done in everyday life rather than as a set of beliefs. He also edited the Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013).1
What is the new animism? #
A way of using the word ‘animism’ for how people live with other persons, human and other-than-human, rather than for what they believe about spirits. Harvey sets out two uses of the word. The older one, from the nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward Tylor and his successors, treats animism as a ‘belief in spirits’, or as a confusion between the living and the dead, or between persons and objects, supposedly found among indigenous peoples and young children. The newer one is concerned with knowing how to behave well towards persons, not all of whom are human.2
For animists of the new kind, the important question is less whether something is a person or an object, and more how persons are to be treated. Animism, in his words, is “concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons.”2 The fuller comparison between the two uses has an answer of its own. See What is the new animism, and how is it different from Tylor’s old idea?
Harvey credits the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell, whose Ojibwe hosts in Canada taught him that the world is full of people, only some of whom are human, and who coined the phrase ‘other-than-human persons’; the new animism, he says, necessarily begins there. He also names Nurit Bird-David and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro among the scholars who restored respect to the word.3 See Who was A. Irving Hallowell, and where does the phrase “other-than-human persons” come from?
What does Harvey mean by a person? #
A being rather than an object, someone animated and social towards others, even if not always sociable. Persons are related beings, made by their many interactions with others; they communicate, they have wills of their own, and they gain meaning and power from their relationships. Being a person does not require looking or acting like a human. Humans are like other persons, not the other way round.4
Recognising persons is also something that has to be learnt. Harvey points out that this animism is found more easily among elders who have thought about it than among children who still need to be taught, and that the aim of the teaching is for people to become better, more respectful persons themselves.4
Why did Harvey keep the word ‘animism’? #
Many scholars have dropped ‘animism’ altogether, and Harvey records why. They regard it as compromised beyond repair by the doubtful part it played in early anthropological theory and in religious argument.5
Harvey agrees with that judgement of the word’s past, but keeps it. The term, he argues, has escaped its colonial origins. Various communities now find it a useful name for what matters to them, some people are happy to introduce themselves as animists, and some researchers have found it a helpful critical term in current debates. Looking back at the old usage still helps, he adds, because the old animism not only got the facts wrong but carried colonialist and dualist assumptions that deserve to be contested.5
Has anyone questioned the new animism? #
Yes. The anthropologist Rane Willerslev, who works with the Yukaghir, a small group of hunters in north-eastern Siberia who live mainly by hunting moose, asks whether the new animist studies, using Harvey’s term for them, are “overstating the seriousness of the indigenous peoples’ own attitudes”. Among the Yukaghir he found a force of laughter and ironic distance towards the spirits that, in his view, the scholarship has underplayed, and he admits leaving such incidents out of his own earlier books because they threatened his aim of taking animism seriously. He credits the new animists with trying to take animism seriously; his question is how seriously the people themselves take it.6
No direct reply from Harvey to this challenge has been found.
What does Harvey say about shamanism? #
He writes about shamans at length, and two of his points bear on modern shamanic practice. First, he argues that Mircea Eliade’s picture of a three-tiered cosmos, offered as an ancient cosmology shared by shamans everywhere, was imposed on far more varied material.7 See Who was Mircea Eliade, and what do critics say is wrong with his idea of shamanism?
Second, he criticises the turning of shamanism into psychology. In Eliade’s account and in Michael Harner’s core shamanism, he says, the shaman’s work becomes a set of techniques for altering consciousness, and in many new Western forms the language of spirits and other worlds refers to inner, psychological realities. He sums it up in the line “traditional shamans undertook spirit journeys while neo-shamans undertake spiritual ones”.8 See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism?
Therapeutic Shamanism teaches the three realmsThree realms. The Upper-World, the middle-world and the Lower-World: the cosmological map of shamanic reality. Rooted first in the Lower-World, then the Upper-World, and only then the middle-world. Read the full answer, the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer and the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer, as the realms met in journeying. On the second point it stands with the shamans Harvey describes. The shamanic realms are real, and the spirits met there are independent beings, not figments of the psyche; people new to journeying often fear they have made it all up, and it is only by practising that they come to tell what is imagined from what is real.9 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism use Harvey’s definition? #
As its own working definition of animism. Animism is not simply the idea that everything is alive, which would be closer to pantheism. It is the experience that everything has personhood: the Animal People, the Plant People, the Stone People, a grandfather river or a grandmother mountain, each someone to be in relationship with. And because it rests on experience, it is not a belief to be taken on faith but something to be tried and found out for oneself.10
Harvey’s stress on relationship carries over too. Our ancestors experienced the world as a community of living, sentient beings, and the deep wound of modern life is separation from it. The relationship with the other-than-human Peoples is not hierarchical; humans sit as equals at the same round table.
Where the two part company is in what each sets out to do. Harvey writes as a scholar describing how people live and speak. Therapeutic Shamanism is a practice, with journeying as its way of entering into those relationships directly. See What is animism? and What is the relationship between animism and shamanism?
