October 28th, 2020

The Politics of Animism
By Jeffrey R. Paine

A first observation:

Animism is personal.

While some entire cultures are animistic, animism seems to naturally occur in every culture. Animism is always the personal experience of the world by the individual, the way they perceive and interact with the human and other-than-human persons in their environment. This applies even when animists experience rituals and events as members of a group.

That sets up my second observation here:

The personal is the political.

It’s a phrase I first heard in the mid-to-late 1970s, probably first from teacher and mentor Ron Shafer, and which apparently was first coined as an expression by one or more feminist writers in about 1969 or 1970. There is, however, recognition that it may have emerged in the thinking and writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist philosopher in the late 1700s.

It’s a saying that has guided my thinking over the years, and you can sometimes see bumper stickers bearing it. I always encouraged my students to consider the ways in which the statement might be true in their own lives. To me, it means that whatever happens to the individual person, whatever issues they may be facing, they are at least partly caused by what happens in their environment, and what they do will impact their environment, affecting others.

Those two observations allow me to reach the following conclusion:

Animism is political.

What does that mean? What is political?

Politics is how any group, from a couple to a family to a business to a church to a nation to the world answers the question, “Who gets What, along with When, Where, Why, and How they get it.” I take this from political scientist Harold Lasswell’s 1936 classic, “Politics: Who gets What, When, How.” I introduced this definition to my students every semester, in every course, because the political permeates my field of public administration and management. And indeed, it permeates every aspect of every individual’s life, as well as all the groups and organizations they are part of or interact with.

That includes not just humans and their groups and organizations, but the other-than-human persons that we live with and interact with each and every day.

I’m led to write about this overlap of concepts because here in America we’re less than a week from the 2020 General Election, which will have a tremendous impact on many of society’s decisions about who is going to get what, from whom, when, where, why, and how.

Modern animists need to think about how their decisions—their personal decisions, their economic decisions, their political decisions, even their spiritual and religious decisions—will impact the ability of others to get (and supply) the five W’s and H. The USA provides the legal framework of a federal republic for its human members, electing our representatives to make collective national and state policies. The economy (which is entirely about Who gets What, etc., and therefore, is also political) is a more or less regulated capitalism, exploiting the other-than-human (and, arguably, many of the human) persons of the Earth for the material benefit of at least some of the human persons—but it is certainly not an equitable distribution of costs and benefits, even among the human persons.

Election season calls us to consider our largest political choices, but only periodically. Modern animists need to also keep their daily personal choices of practice in mind, because the personal IS the political.