INTRODUCTION

This final part engages with various ways in which forms or aspects of animism are performed. These include literature, rituals, music, drumming, film and ritual.

Before her untimely death, Val Plumwood had begun to express her feminist and ecological (or ecofeminist) philosophy as a “philosophical animism”. In her chapter, “Nature in the active voice” (first published as Plumwood 2009), she expresses the hope that writers and readers, and by implication everyone, will “free up your mind, and make your own contributions to the project of disrupting reductionism and mechanism”. With her usual wit and insight, she rejects as inadequate, uncritical, unimaginative and unengaged (and probably dull and deadly) those philosophical and popular views and engagements with the world that are neither participatory nor committed to the well-being of life.

My own chapter builds on an excellent essay by Harry Garuba (2003), a Nigerian poet and academic at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His argument is, in part, that to understand what is happening in Africa today one must engage with what he calls “animist materialism”. This is a rich concept, illustrated in “animist realism”, a genre of novels and poetry, produced especially by indigenous writers, that expresses similar sentiments to that of more traditional myth-tellers. I celebrate some of the animist characters, moments, themes and plots of various indigenous novels produced by African, Native American and Maori writers. I hope this amounts to an encouragement to read and make use of such creative works in further thinking about contemporary animism.