No 137 - Wilma Stockenstrom and the New Animists

 

Are you a “New Animist”? Would you like to be? Is Wilma Stockenström one?

I recently re-read premier Afrikaans writer Wilma Stockenström’s best-known novel, The Journey to the Baobab Tree, in its celebrated translation into English by JM Coetzee. It’s a scintillating, timeless little piece – compact, rich, and poetic – and it reawakened my fringey interest in phenomena of belonging-in-the-world often lumped under the term animism.

Meaning what, exactly? “Animism” has become as complex a word as “nature”, subject to multiple nuances. It was classically defined by British anthropologist E B Tylor, in his Primitive Culture (1871), as, crudely, “belief in spirits”. That is, “primitive” or “precolonial” peoples, in his view, mistakenly invested rocks, rivers, animals, thunder and such-like with “spirits” which required prayer and appeasement. Such nonsense, according to Tylor, would be superseded by scientific rationalism. This condescending view remains very current, but Tylor and his ilk have been increasingly taken to task in recent decades for being in turn mistaken, or at the very least misleadingly superficial.

Let’s note for a start that some or other form of animism has characterised human relations with the non-human world for a good 100 000 years or more, and in many quarters continues to do so. By comparison, the now-dominant monotheistic religions are mere juvenile upstarts. Lynn White among others has argued that, in the West at least, Christianity, by insisting on a total division between the “higher” realm of “soul” or “spirit” and the forgettable dross of the material body, has enabled the current unfeeling and profligate exploitation of the natural world. Compared to Heaven the Earth doesn’t matter much. Scientific rationalism, for all its self-evident value, has further provided the technology that has made the exploitation as damaging as it is.

Human-caused planetary poisoning, habitat denudation, species extinction and climate disruption have given a new impetus to attempts to find ways to counter that self-destructive trajectory. One way is to revisit the ageless traditions of animism. Not to “go back” to some imaginary precolonial paradise (which did not exist), but to use what appears as valuable in various animist world-views to critique and reconsider our modern predicament – to forge a “New Animism”. So thinkers from sundry fields – philosophy, religious studies, animal ethology, anthropology, literature, even urban planning – refer regularly to human-nature relations as lived out among the Khoisan and the Ojibwe, the Australian Aboriginals and the Amazonian Yanamamo, the Congolese Pygmies and the West African Vodun.

Some are rightly cautious about romanticising such peoples’ lifeways – profoundly respectful of “nature”, to be sure, but also often vulnerable, conflictual, and predatory. But most New Animist thinkers seem agreed that they share one vital thing: the understanding that ultimately there is no human/non-human divide, no real gulf between “culture” and “nature”. There may be talk of “spirits” and “gods” and colourful propitiation rituals, but these are just surface manifestations. Fundamentally, animist cultures make no distinction between the spiritual and the material. Rather, energies of unseen provenance and pathways surge through everything, animate and non-animate alike. There isn’t the same kind of “belief” in a separable “God” figure or “Holy Spirit” as in mainstream Christianity. When I was delving into West African Mami Wata iconography and the cultures of Vodun (often caricatured as “voodoo”), though they seem seriously weird to the outsider, I was struck by how earthy these practices are. Vodun icons are constructed from multiple materials, integral to specific locales and each carrying specific energy-connotations: nothing is without significance, from rocks to nails, from goat-hair to river mud, palm-fibre to feathers. Here, matter matters. Sensuous and spiritual, indivisibly and simultaneously. By comparison, the major religions’ spiritual conceptions appeared vague, cerebral, even vacuous.

The New Animists try to recapture or refurbish this mode of living-integrally-in-the-world in various ways. Graham Harvey, long one of the central figures in the movement, puts it this way in a recent article, “Animism and Ecology” (accessible on ecologicalcitizen.com):

Primarily, [the New Animist] approach emphasizes relationality: the notion that personhood is not the possession of a certain sort of non-relational, interior property (e.g. being self-conscious, or having a spirit or mind), but is instead constituted by interactions between beings. That is, rather than think in terms of individuality or selfhood, animist ontologies view persons as constituted by the shifting interactions of continuously negotiable relational acts.

An extension of the notion of ubuntu, in a way. Harvey is also the editor of a landmark volume, The Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013), containing chapters by numerous illustrious commentators, from biologists to theologians, though mostly anthropologists. Discussion of literature is notably sparse, apart from Harvey’s own contribution on animism’s role in some “indigenous” novels.

Which reminds me: The Journey to the Baobab Tree. What’s the connection? The novella is narrated by an unnamed slave-woman, living in (perhaps) the late 15^th century on Africa’s East Coast, where oceanic commerce flourishes, including the African-Arab slave trade. Having been snatched somewhere in the interior, the narrator has been bought and sold three or four times, ending up with a somewhat more appreciative aristocrat known only as the Stranger. This man decides to launch an expedition into the interior. The venture gradually unravels, everybody deserting or dying until the narrator is left alone, barely surviving in the bole of a baobab tree. This basic narrative has to be teased out of a rich but confusing presentation of mingled episodes and tangled memories that, doubtless deliberately, make a mockery of linear time.

To help make sense of it I returned to an excellent MA thesis I supervised back in 2011, by Eleanore (Ella) Johnson. Her chapter on The Journey explored the notion of reading the novella as “ecocentric”. She was onto the animist element, too, albeit briefly. She noted how the narrator becomes conscious of her interconnectedness with her environment, increasingly so as she is divested of the muffling protections of “civilisation”, divested almost of a sense of individual selfhood altogether. Certainly the story is critical of the self-serving commercialism of coastal civilisation, exploiting helpless humans and animals alike. In contrast, the narrator projects: “I am of a self-sufficient crystallinity, transmuted into pure bliss. I am one whole, and divided too and present in everything everywhere.” Crucially, however, this is contained in a fantasy of a utopia. Her actual life in the vicinity of the baobab is far more fraught. She is too civilised, ignorant, “ill-equipped” to survive even though she’s in the midst of  a rich ecosystem, virtually “paradisal luxuriance.” She comes to realise she is only one of many animals competing for fruits and seeds; baboons frighten her in their very resemblance to her. Part of the story’s purpose seems to be to dislodge the human’s sense of centrality to the universe (the West’s prevailing myth). Even the powerful Stranger succumbs, “Come to his end in the belly of a crocodile. … One is so used to regarding other inhabitants of the earth as food … that it seems terribly funny when other-consuming man is himself eaten.”

As it happens, one of the contributors to Harvey’s Handbook is my favourite environmental philosopher, the late Val Plumwood. She also got chewed up by a crocodile (an Australian saltie), though survived that to write a stunning essay entitled “On Being Prey”. At least some contemporary animists recognise that becoming more respectfully attuned to our ultimate (inter)dependence on the non-human world has its limits, might also entail exposure to predation – not least by innumerable bacterial and viral attackers. After all, not even our sterile and sterilised cities could shield all of us from Covid-19. The Journey to the Baobab Tree does seem in part to warn us against the more warm-and-fuzzy notions of some New Animists. The narrator is dependent on shadowy indigenous people – unnamed but recognisably “Bushmen” – who leave food as offerings, taking her to be some sort of tree-dwelling supernatural being. But she is left doubly destitute when they in turn are all but wiped out by another bunch of passing (human) marauders.

It's all a bubbly, attractive, complex arena of possibility. I’ve scarcely begun to think it all through. The question remains: How can we best interrelate with the non-human denizens of our hyper-integrated world? Can we (re)establish some sort of reverential symbiosis with the bases of all life? The ending of The Journey suggests that the greatest obstacle to expanding a mutually fruitful New Animism might be – human nature itself.

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