Animist Anthropology: What, Why, and How
Animist Anthropology: What, Why, and How
Can treating cultural forces as beings help make anthropology more people-shaped?
Animist anthropology treats large cultural forces like nations, religions, and movements as living beings. This approach aims to make our understanding of cultures more intuitive and useful to both scholars and non-specialists.
Key points:
Animist anthropology views cultural forces as entities with agency and intelligence, but not consciousness.
The goal is to make anthropological knowledge more "people-shaped" and accessible.
This perspective may produce insights different from other anthropological approaches.
This essay presents the concept of animist anthropology, discusses its potential benefits, and explores how it might be applied in daily life and for scholarly work.
Origins and Plan of Exploration
The podcast episode "Animism is Normative Consciousness" by The Emerald is an hour-long enumeration of the benefits of reviving our ancestral animist lens. From its description:
For 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate.
This is still true outside of those who received Westernized education. People continue to live in a world that is "full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others."1 Given this, speaking of cultural forces as beings might be closer to most people's "native tongue" than the language of academic anthropology and, therefore, more useful to the layman.
I experienced the usefulness of animism in another domain. Years ago, I experimented with some practices presented in Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic (2015), a guide for creative work. One technique was to treat ideas as living beings: to listen to them, negotiate and wrestle with them, and work with these beings to manifest them in this world. It was a revival of the ancient—and animist!—practice of working with one’s muses. It worked. Since then, I started a (failed) cacao business, led a genetic sequencing project during the pandemic, and wrote my first book.
So, as I got deeper into the study of anthropology, I had to ask: What if animism works because it is actually an accurate representation of reality? What would anthropology and ethnography look like if we applied an animist lens to it?
To answer these questions, I'll first modulate animism to the level that I think represents reality: these creatures have agency and intelligence but not consciousness. Next, I'll present a couple of examples—Technocapital and a nation-state—as a demonstration of animist anthropology. Lastly, I'll map out how I can test out this approach in my scholarly work (e.g., “animist ethnography”) and in writing for normal people (e.g., in the “personal growth” genre).
The Reality of These Beings
There are three levels at which this animist approach might represent reality:
1) as a metaphor
2) as a recognition of the agency and intelligence of these beings
3) as a recognition of the consciousness of these beings
As a writer, I like how well the animist lens works in explaining cultural forces to non-specialists. For instance, an invisible war between two of these creatures over the past century was the best solution I found to explain why the Philippines chose the son of the dictator as president.
I also find the metaphor useful as a student of anthropology. Those familiar with Émile Durkheim's functionalism and propensity for biological analogies would see how the sensorial recognition of the “organs” of these beings works as a metaphor for how aspects of culture function as their replicators. More on this in the next section.
The coercive power of cultures on individuals that Durkheim points out is what I call "agency." This is an agency similar to those of non-human organisms: an impulse that changes the world around them for the purpose of survival and reproduction. Volcanoes change the world around them but with no intent on continuing to live as volcanoes and producing offspring volcanoes. In contrast, plants, animals, and microorganisms all change the world around them (i.e., rearrange matter) with the intent of delaying death and producing offspring. Gene-centric Darwinism is an even closer analog to culture: genes, through the living bodies in which they are coded, change their surrounding matter for the purpose of survival and reproduction. At this level, I am not saying anything beyond Richard Dawkins's concept of "memes": ideas that have the power and the intent—the agency—of replicating themselves is an important unit of culture to study. Animist anthropology goes further in its recognition that symbiotic collections of ideas that have lifespans of hundreds to thousands of years—“memeplexes”—are also important units of culture to study. They also have agency. They change the world around them for their survival and growth.
Animist anthropology also recognizes the intelligence of these beings, but not necessarily their consciousness. Today's widespread access to large language models (LLM) has demonstrated to many the possibility of advanced intelligence without consciousness, or at least without the kind of consciousness we experience as people. The substrate of the intelligence of LLMs is silicon, but the substrate of the intelligence of these beings is human minds. For instance, nations exist through the collective imagination of the persons who identify with them. We can see a nation's intelligence in the way it reacts throughout history in response to other large cultural forces and to individual men and women to continue its survival and growth. The Philippine nation, for example, has negotiated for itself a somewhat stable place among more powerful entities (like the United States and China) as well as among its power-playing constituents and the family units in which they tend to operate. Furthermore, nations maintain their identity despite the deaths and new births of the components of their substrate.
Another example of the intelligence of these beings is in the power of what the British philosopher Nick Land calls Technocapital. The intelligence of this symbiosis of capitalism and technological innovation can be seen in how it has expanded itself with greater and greater speed by coordinating the cycle of desire, innovation, and production across billions of human minds across centuries.
Ascribing consciousness to these beings, I think, is a distorted representation of reality. This was the mistake of premodern cultures that treated these forces as gods. This is also the mistake of occultists who try to communicate with these beings through their rituals. They call them “egregores.” The occultists are right that collaborating with these beings is a source of wealth and power (see next section). However, talking to these beings is like talking to cats or dogs.
This is why I prefer to call these beings “psychic megafauna” or “psychofauna.” This word, coined by internet wordsmith
, evokes agency and power over humans, unlike “meme” and “memeplex,” but it does not fall into the misconception of attributing consciousness to these beings the way “gods” and “egregores” do.Examples: Technocapital and a Nation-State
Let's get to know two examples of psychofauna: Technocapital and a nation-state, the Philippines. This can serve as a demonstration of animist anthropology.
In my animist reinterpretation and extrapolation of Durkheim's ideas, I presented these four characteristics of psychofauna:
Psychofauna emerge from the substrate of human minds.
Psychofauna emerge from positive feedback loops.
Psychofauna have coercive power over humans.
Psychofauna are also creatures of evolution.
Animist anthropology is, firstly, a weapon of defense. Seeing and understanding these psychofauna can help us better protect ourselves from enslavement by them (i.e., ideological capture). Animist anthropology also allows us to better collaborate with these psychofauna if we so choose. Once we put on our animist lens, we will see that the only way to make an impact on the world, create wealth or gain power at scale is to work with at least one of these psychofauna. Let's unpack the mechanism behind the power of these psychofauna to influence human minds and the world around them.
Our entry point is Dawkins's observation that psychofuana are also creatures of evolution. They are “memes,” the cultural analog to genes. As such, they compete for the limited resource of their substrate—minds. Like biological species, the psychofauna that are best at survival and replication will eventually dominate the playing field. This field has been called the “noösphere.”
The concept of “positive feedback loops” from the field of cybernetics adds another layer to this competition. Positive feedback loops have components that reinforce each other, resulting in the growth of each component and of the overall system. The psychofauna that eventually dominate are those with the strongest positive feedback loops and those that can find stability as they grow (positive feedback loops can in some cases also result in the destruction of the system).
In my Durkheim post, I gave the example of Technocapital and entrepreneurs as components of a positive feedback loop. Technocapital produces more entrepreneurs by rewarding the successful ones with wealth and status. “Success” here is defined by how much the entrepreneur expands and strengthens Technocapital, thus creating a positive loop of more entrepreneurs and the growth of Technocapital.
If we enhance the resolution of this example, we will see other components within this positive feedback loop:
Consumer-laborers whose desire and work fuel the cycle
Marketers who increase desire and create new desires
The technologists who create new objects of desire and whose innovations increase the efficiency of fulfilling desires
Capital allocators whose work functions like natural selection, directing resources to the most successful species within the ecosystem that is Technocapital
Consumer-laborers are rewarded by Technocapital with what they desire in exchange for their time and part of their minds. Marketers, technologists, and capital allocators, by working directly in the growth of Technocapital in a way that scales, tend to be rewarded with more wealth than consumer-laborers. Entrepreneurs and managers—who, by definition, orchestrate work, technology, and capital—tend to contribute the most to the growth of Technocapital (when successful!), so they also tend to get rewarded with a lot of wealth. Technocapital's positive feedback loop explains the accelerating growth of technology and wealth that humanity has been experiencing in the recent past.
This growth has a dark side. So, in the 20th century, people attempted to replace Technocapital with another psychofauna. Karl Marx saw the creature: “A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism,” we read in the opening of the Communist Manifesto (emphasis mine). The goal was to reward laborers for their work at a level similar to entrepreneurs, marketers, and technologists. This meant replacing the distributed intelligence of Technocapital with a select cadre of human minds (central planning) and enforcing their theory of value through the state's monopoly of violence. The results were disastrous. The more or less stable compromise today is for nation-states to collaborate with Technocapital but with some guardrails, like labor laws and minimum wage.
Next, let's look at the positive feedback loops of nation-states. This species of psychofauna has become one of the most dominant since its emergence two hundred plus years ago. Since this species has many variations, let me explore the one I'm most familiar with: the Philippines.
Like all nations, the Philippines collaborates with different kinds of humans for its survival and growth.
Similar to entrepreneurs, politicians orchestrate other players within the system. They do this through law, the state bureaucracy, and the distribution of power and its benefits. Sometimes, they use violence. The nation rewards them with power. Many of them translate this power into money.
Similar to marketers, propagandists and nationalist intellectuals mold the hearts and minds of citizens for the sake of the nation. They are rewarded with meaning and status.
State bureaucrats and soldiers lend their minds and bodies for the nation to engage with its citizens and to negotiate with other psychofauna. They get a stable job in exchange.
Citizens constitute the mass of the nation's mental substrate. Their belief sustains the imagined community of the nation and their work supports the politicians, propagandists, bureaucrats, and soldiers through various modern forms of tribute, like tax and kickbacks. In return, they are given safety and identity.
The state is the much older component of this symbiosis of nation and state. In Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson argues that it was Technocapital, or, in his words, “print-capitalism,” that enabled the emergence of the modern nation starting in the 18th century. This collaboration between Technocapital and nation-states has continued. The state supports Technocapital by enforcing contracts and the value of the state's fiat currency. Conversely, Technocapital has become a vital part of the foundation of modern nation-states, enabling them to function with unprecedented scale and complexity. Technocapital’s role is highlighted by its absence in premodern polities, which tend to rely on ritual sacrifice and caste to maintain their power structures. See, for instance, Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms (1999) by Laura Junker, and On Kings (2017) by Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber.
Animist Anthropology for Personal Growth and Scholarly Work
The only way to know whether the approach of animist anthropology actually works is to test it out. First, would unveiling and studying psychofauna help people to operate in today's world? It seems that escape from ideological capture, or at least awareness of one's captors, was the intent of the word’s originator:
I'm personally interested in my own freedom from these creatures. I've also tested this approach in face-to-face conversations, and the results have been encouraging.
I’m wondering if I could create a Psychofauna Defense Manual through a crossover of the anthropology of premodern kingships, Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (1951), Jacques Ellul's Propaganda (1962), and Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game (2018). Another approach would be to reconstitute DARPA's 1,600-page compendium on memetics and memetic warfare into a shorter guide written for the normal citizen instead of high-functioning sociopaths in positions of power. If this already exists or someone is already working on this, please tell me, so I don't need to do it myself.
One psychofauna I know personally is Technocapital. Most of my work in the past decade has been building a business and running it, so I have been wrestling and dancing a lot with this dragon. I see two common problems that stem from misunderstanding this creature:
Artists tend to confuse Technocapital with their muses, which results in a lot of heartaches. I sense that the animist lens would be especially useful for artists.
Philosophically inclined entrepreneurs and operators of businesses tend to seek meaning in their collaboration with Technocapital. I used to be like this. This meaning-making needs to be modulated. Otherwise, it can also result in a kind of possession.
A lot of people talk about problems stemming from their “relationship with money.” If we see Technocapital and understand its intentions and powers, we can better see the force behind our problematic desires.
I also want to try out this approach in my scholarly work. I'm currently writing a piece entitled Explaining the Charm of Baguio City Through an Animist Ethnography. This uses sensory ethnography work I did while participating in an Urban Humanities Field School. Here's a preview. I created a “music soundscape: of the city by listing down the music I heard during our short stay there. (Thanks, Technocapital, for the power to do this!) Without an animist lens, it’s hard for a Filipino scholar to see anything that would bring out the city's identity from this data: you'd get a similar graph in other big cities in the country.
However, if we ask, "Which psychofauna are operating and dominating Baguio's noösphere?" then we would see the United States of America and other nation-states. We can cross-check this observation with our visual ethnography, which will also show us the dominance of Technocapital and Christianity, with their temples crowning the hilltops of the city. By removing the sensorial manifestations of psychofauna common across the country, we will end up with what is uniquely Baguio. Using our knowledge of the nature of psychofauna (e.g., positive feedback loops) and the city's history, we can perhaps get an explanation of its charm.
Lastly, I'd like to explore a few questions for the aficionados.
What kind of knowledge does animist anthropology create? Is it useful merely in the sense that it helps people operate better in the world, like what Neil Postman argues in Social Science as Theology (1984)? Or can it help create “good explanations,” as described by David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity (2011)?
“Reification” would probably be the knee-jerk critique to animist anthropology for those with a bit of background in the epistemological history of anthropology. I'd like to steelman the animist approach by addressing the epistemological risks that reification highlights: e.g., oversimplification, naturalization of social constructs, and masking of power structures. This might also be a good place to bring in David Deutsch's defense of the reality of abstractions in The Beginning of Infinity.
How is the unveiling of psychofauna different from postmodernism's “incredulity to metanarratives”? Aside from being more user-friendly for normal people (animism is, after all, normative consciousness), animist anthropology might give people more agency than mere deconstruction. Perhaps. We'll see.
I want to do a more comprehensive application of cybernetics to psychofauna, or large cultural forces like nations, religions, and movements. My four favorites are archaic society (I call this bad boy “The Ancient One”), the Philippines, Technocapital, and Christianity. How do other cybernetic concepts apply to them? E.g., homeostasis, adaptation, information theory, control theory, autopoiesis, and redundancy. Gregory Bateson seems to be the most well-known anthropologist to have used cybernetics. I'll have to look at his work more closely.
I'm putting this out there in case some of you might be interested in taking on this work. These are very intriguing to me, but at the moment they’re distractions from the book I'm currently writing. Muses are not gigantic psychofauna but they also compete for the same substrate. I also don’t want to be enslaved by them. Freedom from psychofauna allows us to collaborate better with them, whether that work is for changing the world, wealth creation, scholarship, or art.
Thanks Raymond Ng for the editing.
Julius Bautista, "On the Personhood of Sacred Objects: Agency, Materiality and Popular Devotion in the Roman Catholic Philippines," Religions 12, no. 7 (2021): 454, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12070454, citing Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).