What is Animism — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00[Music] This is a general presentation video  that talks about what I actually mean by
2. 0:14Nordic animism. I'll try to address some of the  misunderstandings concerning animism and talk a
3. 0:21little bit about how gods relates to animism –  the idea of gods. I'll touch on cosmology, and,
4. 0:29of course, the specifically Nordic modality  of animism. My name is Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen.
5. 0:36I'm a Danish historian of religion. I have my  PhD from the University of Uppsala in Sweden,
6. 0:42and I'm presently working to develop the  concept of Nordic animism as a perspective
7. 0:48on traditional knowledge in Northern Europe. And  if you appreciate what I do, then do consider
8. 0:56Patrean supporting me. What I do is a fruit of the  lifelong education, but for me getting paid for my
9. 1:04work, like any carpenter or plumber, is almost a  utopian dream, because there's a general problem
10. 1:10in academia that early-career scholars often live  very precarious existences with flexploitation
11. 1:18deals, and without any social security and so on,  partly because knowledge traditions in Northern
12. 1:24Europe are being dismantled by neo-capitalist  states. So if you want support me, there's
13. 1:30a Patreon link somewhere around this video.  Ok, first let me explain animism in general,
14. 1:37because there's some inaccuracy in how people  tend to see this concept. Many see animism
15. 1:44as the idea that everything is animate, and  that this is foundational, somehow basic to
16. 1:50religion. And I won't go into the specifics  of the research history behind this idea,
17. 1:56just to say that it is kind of an anachronistic  position on what animism is. It's linked, sort of,
18. 2:04to early scholarship, and actually sort of racist  science where animism was seen as the beginning of
19. 2:10an evolution that would actually lead to white  Eurocentric enlightenment through different
20. 2:16stages of polytheism, monotheism, and so on. So,  animism was the marker of the primitive childish
21. 2:26other – typically African or somebody with darker  skin tone than me. But today this is not how we
22. 2:34see or how we understand or how we talk about  animism in scholarship. First, there's not an
23. 2:42equal distribution of spirits throughout the  material world. It's more asymmetrical. It's
24. 2:51more potential, somehow. We'd rather talk about  persons, or other-than-human persons. And objects,
25. 2:58organisms, landscape formations, natural  phenomena and so on – they aren't necessarily
26. 3:03equally personal. This depends on the context,  because communities are different. We also know
27. 3:10this from human communities. The world of persons  is differently structured in different settings.
28. 3:19In one specific place, specific stone persons may  be really, really important. In another setting,
29. 3:26specific tree persons. In another setting,  again, some trees may be really important
30. 3:31but others less important. For instance, here  in Southern Scandinavia and Northern Germany,
31. 3:35people have had a very strong relation with the  elder tree for some reason. Now, the British
32. 3:44scholar Graham Harvey – he formulates the notion  of animism as the idea that the world is filled
33. 3:50with persons, only some of whom are human, but all  of whom deserve respect. And this "respect" is a
34. 3:59key word in so many indigenous languages and is  perhaps the key ethical concept in animism. And
35. 4:10this translates – it's not only respect for bear  persons and pig persons and oak persons and hill
36. 4:16persons. It also count for human difference,  of course, and cultural difference. Another
37. 4:23important point is that animism is not simple –  it's not primitive. Europeans used to think this,
38. 4:29and that's absolutely wrong. In fact animism or  animist knowledge forms are rather advanced ways
39. 4:37of knowing and practicing. And some scholars  tend to label it animism when we shout at our
40. 4:43dysfunctional printer, because that ascribes an  intention and thereby it makes it into a person,
41. 4:49or when a child hits herself on a chair and  then says "naughty chair" – it makes the chair
42. 4:55personal. I agree to some extent but there's a  really, really important modification to this,
43. 5:03and that is that a child will also say that, you  know, the stars are hundred kilometers away. And,
44. 5:09in the same sense, that is astronomy, right? It  is in fact a statement about distance in space
45. 5:16using the concepts available to the child. But in  cultures with strong animist knowledge culture,
46. 5:27animism is something you take a lifetime to  learn. Elders are the ones that know it the best,
47. 5:33not children, and it is operationalized  in technologies of staggering complexity,
48. 5:39you know? These technologies encompass ways  of mediating and communicating with these
49. 5:45persons – this is sometimes called shamanism –  and it's fundamentally these technologies about
50. 5:56creating and maintaining relation with  these person, typically through ritual,
51. 6:02typically ritual of engagement or sharing.  You give them something and then you create
52. 6:08a friendly, respectful relation – a relation of  exchange, basically. That's the logic in offerings
53. 6:15and sacrificial ritual and so on. Right. The  specifically Nordic kind of animism is, of course,
54. 6:25the kind of relations and relation-making – the  animist traditions – that are characteristic of
55. 6:31Northern Europe, where I'm focused on northwestern  Europe and Scandinavia. That's where I'm from.
56. 6:37And there are a number of specific features  and I can only sort of give you a bit of a
57. 6:43superficial taste here. For instance, you  know, alcohol and the sharing of alcohol,
58. 6:48particularly beer, is very characteristic and  very central. There are also specific kinds
59. 6:56of masking rituals and there are specific ways  of relating to the turning of seasons. If you
60. 7:03follow this channel in general, you often hear  me saying that this or that is "characteristic of
61. 7:07Nordic animism." So, there's also, like, specific  kinds of sacred landscape. There's millennia of
62. 7:14sacralizing ancient burial mounds, for instance.  There are a specific trees linked with homesteads,
63. 7:20specific lines of spirits – wights and so on.  There are specific brands of nature spirits
64. 7:25and spirits of specific organisms that give  humans life. Here in Southern Scandinavia,
65. 7:31for instance, the rye is really important.  This is Nordic animism – the kind of animism
66. 7:37that people have in Northern Europe. Animism is  basically about relating – like, for instance,
67. 7:44the Inuit – they have a really important relation  with the sea. And in this relating, the sea is a
68. 7:50person, the sea is a mother. So the sea mother  emerges in the relating. And humans can build
69. 7:57a relation with the sea as a subjective agent. And  this is sometimes called dividuation – the process
70. 8:05through which subjectivity is secreted through  relation or engagement. But that's a long story. A
71. 8:13specific question in this relation is gods – is it  animism when there are gods in a religious system?
72. 8:21And the idea that gods don't belong in animism –  that is actually rooted in the old evolutionist
73. 8:26idea of animism, where polytheism was considered  a higher stage of evolution. But scholars don't
74. 8:34really use these kind of derogatory, not to  say racist, ideas anymore, and the kinds of
75. 8:40religion – that relation to these cosmocratic gods  – that can certainly be called a kind of animism,
76. 8:47sometimes it's called hierarchical animism or  analogism, and you find it among Hawai'ians,
77. 8:52the Chinese, the Orisha religion derived from  West Africa, my main field, Aztecs – and European
78. 9:00traditional polytheisms are examples of this.  These deities are composite persons. You know,
79. 9:09like the energy mother is the inua (the person)  of the sea. Thor is a personhood of a series
80. 9:16of aspects of reality – a day of the week,  specific planets, specific landscapes, persons,
81. 9:21weather phenomena, families, animals, cultural  activities, meanings, values, holidays, colors,
82. 9:28moods, persons, places, etc., etc., etc. You could  say that Thor is the personification that relates
83. 9:36people to this cluster of phenomena in the world.  In a similar way, that the sea mother is that
84. 9:41subjectivity in the Inuit relating to the sea.  It's just a complex aspect of reality. And animism
85. 9:50is ways of relating, and this is why it changes  the perspective on cultural history a bit. So
86. 9:56if you're interested in Nordic heathen religion,  then that can surely be analyzed from an animist
87. 10:00perspective or seen as a kind of animism, but it's  only part of this animist tradition, you know?
88. 10:06When a Swedish peasant sacrifices a horse to Saint  Eric in Uppsala, then this is not a pre-Christian
89. 10:13in any sense, you know, the man identifies as  Christian, even identifies this specific ritual
90. 10:18as an expression of Christian devotion, and  Christianity has been a dominating discourse
91. 10:23in Sweden for centuries at the point where he's  doing this – but if you take on an animist lens,
92. 10:28then surely we can see this ritual as an  expression of Nordic animism in changing ways of
93. 10:34creating relation through the ages – where perhaps  this act is related to earlier notions of Fréyr
94. 10:45the patron deity of the Swedish kings. So looking  at Nordic animism is partly a scholarly project
95. 10:56of analyzing North European cultural history  through this specific lens, and this can be
96. 11:02applied to unpack our cultural history as majority  traditional ecological knowledge, for instance.
97. 11:07And I think that folklore and ancient polytheism  are amazing resources, in fact, of traditional
98. 11:15animus knowledge, and need to be given scholarly  attention as such – majority animisms. And also,
99. 11:26by the way, scholarship has to be applied to  the rejection processes in which these kind of
100. 11:31knowledge forms are being marginalized and othered  as non-representative of majority people who are
101. 11:37then supposed to be nationalist, enlightened,  rationalist, and so on. But it also implies
102. 11:45working with Nordic animism in a more cultural  activist sense, like eco-animist activism based
103. 11:51on our traditional animist knowledge. And I've  been working on this in different ways. I've been
104. 11:57writing a series of newspaper articles, or I've  been co-writing with a group of scholars that
105. 12:02I've gathered for this purpose, in order to raise  a serious scholarly voice for traditional animist
106. 12:09knowledge forms from the majority populations.  Also I'm trying to reclaim and renew traditional
107. 12:16animist Yule ritual, and I've been producing  a calendar to make available this kind of
108. 12:24cultural reclaiming to majority people around  the Western world. And I'm running this Nordic
109. 12:33animism platform on Facebook and YouTube,  Instagram, in order to sort of bring this
110. 12:36perspective into play and thereby also test it. So  this is partly also intended as an alternative to
111. 12:48the horrid and mean-spirited exploitation that  our cultural heritage suffers at the hands of
112. 12:54different kinds of nationalists – nationalisms and  race nationalisms and cultural nationalisms and
113. 13:00folkish positions and similar inherently bigoted  ideologies. So yeah. Thanks thanks for listening,
114. 13:10and if you're interested in supporting this  work with opening a new perspective on Nordic
115. 13:15cultural history of religions that makes  available majority animist knowledge for
116. 13:21populations of the Western world, then you can  Patreon support me and you can share this video.
117. 13:27You can find me on on YouTube, Facebook, and so  on. So, thanks for listening and see you around!