Ritual Animism: Indigenous Performances, Interbeings Ceremonies and Alternative Spiritualities in the Global Rights of Nature Networks

Abstract

Many ceremonies take place within the movement for the rights of nature, led by representatives of indigenous peoples and by non-indigenous ceremonialists that draw inspiration from them. The description of these ceremonies of (re)connection to non-human entities, water in particular, help understand better the mechanisms of ritual innovation and hybridization at work, as well as the processes of legitimation. What is defined in this chapter as ritual animism is understood as a tentative to overcome the cerebral bias that leads towards the naturalistic separation of nature and culture, body and mind. Such ritual animism aims to develop and facilitate a direct, incorporated relationship, with these more-than-humans. But it fails to foster an “ontology of dwelling” and these ceremonies are rather used to promote a holistic and monistic worldview that is shared with the broader alternative spiritualities milieu.

Mourning Glaciers: Animism Reconsidered through Ritual and Sensorial Relationships with Mountain Entities in the Alps

“…In a recently published article, the anthropologists Elisabetta Dall'Ò and Giovanni Gugg, by focusing on the performances, especially musical ones, taking place at "glacier funerals", show how reaching an emotional level can help to make the changes more real than cold, rational facts: "Requiems for glaciers allow us to feel more clearly and more intimately the epochal process we are experiencing, intensify our sense of connection with others-human and non-human-and with the ecosystem, but above all create a substratum favourable to the sentimental elaboration and cognitive interpretation of a phenomenon-climate change-which, to date, we are still unable to understand in its entirety with rationality alone, nor to manage with the mere accumulation of data and information, however essential they may be" [44] (p. 110). (Author's translation) I agree with this interpretation, which is close to the analysis I made of the ceremonies organised during the gatherings that promote the rights of nature [27]. However, more can be said about such rituals.…”

“…On the other hand, the concept of animism forged more than a century ago by Edward B. Tylor, which was abandoned for a long time by anthropologists to the common sense, and understood as a primitive and erroneous belief that natural entities are animated, i.e., gifted with a soul (anima in Latin) and endowed with intention, is indeed coming back to animate the debate [27]. As early as the 1960s, Irving Hallowell refuted the definition of animism as the systematic attribution of a living soul to inanimate objects, such as stones; the Ojibwa he studied could recognise a potential for animation in certain classes of objects in certain circumstances, and not in others, depending on their experience of them [28] (p. 24).…”