How alive is the world? 5 Questions on animism for anthropologist of religion Justine Quijada
Quijada discusses a worldview that extends social relationships beyond the human.
A psychedelic experience can change a person’s beliefs about the nature of reality. One study from 2021 found that after using psychedelic drugs, some people shift away from materialist beliefs and start believing in panpsychism or animism.
A philosophical reminder: Materialism is the idea that matter is just matter, and the world around you is made only of such inert physical stuff. Consciousness might emerge from matter, but isn’t a given, or universal. Materialists usually don’t believe in entities like spirits or gods either. A panpsychist or animist worldview is a bit different. In panpsychism, mind or consciousness is everywhere, imbued in everything, and is fundamental to how the universe is.
Animism is a broad category of beliefs and practices that assumes the “animation of all nature,” and that other living things (animals, plants) or places (mountains, rivers) are spiritual, powerful, subjective beings. Animism is a common belief system in Indigenous cultures and while it is undergoing renewed interest in Western society in psychedelic circles, it can be misunderstood, says Justine Quijada, an anthropologist of religion at Wesleyan University whose field work is in Buryatia, an Indigenous republic inside the Russian Federation. The Microdose talked to Quijada about how a shift towards animism might impact a person, and where psychedelic-induced animism differs from Indigenous animist beliefs.
Animism encompasses a huge range of practices and beliefs. How would you go about describing or defining it?
When I talk about defining animism, it’s important to briefly think about where the concept comes from, because the origin of the term carries baggage with it. The term was coined by Edward Tylor, an anthropologist back in the 1870s. Like most Victorians, he had a very hierarchical sense of how the world worked. Animism was a term for belief systems that, in effect, were mistaken. They were people who believed that things had souls and spirits that modern people, who had science, knew were inanimate. It’s not a wrong definition, but it was a definition that was coined in contrast with an inanimate, scientific way of thinking.
I tend to define animism a bit differently. Ideas about souls and spirits, and what it means to be animate, an agent or subject in the world, can vary from one culture to another. I define animism as worldviews or belief systems that extend social relationships beyond the human. A river isn’t just a thing out there in the world that you can measure, it is a person or a being that you have a relationship with.
In psychology, people think about how narcissists think about other humans as objects versus subjects. This is a worldview within which things that science considers objects are subjects in their own right. The degree to which they have a personality, will, desire, or power over other people varies. But you relate to entities and animals in the world around you as subjects rather than as objects, and you have social relationships with them. There was an anthropologist in the 1940s named Alfred Hallowell, who coined a phrase, “other-than-human person”—and I think that’s a useful term.
What’s the relationship between animism, shamanism, and altered states of consciousness?
Animism and shamanism are two sides of the same coin. We think of them sometimes as being separate systems, but Caroline Humphrey, who writes about animism, coined this, which I like: animism describes the worldview or belief system within which it makes sense to have a shaman.
If the world is a community of beings that all exist in this space, we need certain specialists who are able to communicate with beings that don’t necessarily communicate in a way that humans can easily understand. The shamans are the specialists that help intervene, that help mediate, that help communicate with these other beings and solve problems when they come up and also heal people. Altered states of consciousness can be induced with psychedelics or not. Even when they’re induced with psychedelics, there’s almost always some sort of music to help facilitate it. Often, spirits will give people the song that they need to communicate with them.
Rituals and making an offering are also forms of communication. You can read landscape signs. You can read the way the water rises and falls in the river. Those are all ways of communicating. The way shamans communicate more directly through altered states of consciousness are for when you really need to fix things.
What do you make about the research findings showing that people with materialist beliefs sometimes shift towards animism or panpsychism after a psychedelic experience? Does this seem different from the animism you have studied in Indigenous groups?
With shamans, only specific people have a calling to become a shaman. It is a process that often begins in suffering, in unexplained illness symptoms, fevers, tremors, seizures, and depression. That helps to break down the life you had before, and then you rebuild yourself into being a shaman. There are moments where you have these revelations and these experiences where your ancestors come and tell you that you’ve been chosen. Then the question is, how do you rebuild your life into a life based around the idea that you have these obligations to these ancestral spirits.
There’s a difference between having a one-time realization, and building that realization into your everyday life. I think in the West, we have a more Christian way of thinking about how you’re saved through one salvational experience—you’re saved, and then that’s it. [For shamans], it’s more like a person would have this revelation, but then build it into a life that’s based on this new system. That’s a little bit harder.
Another thing that I’ve noticed as a trend, though certainly not universal, that often turns up in western psychedelic or neoshamanic approaches is that the beings that are encountered—spirits of animals, places, and nature—are presumed to be generally helpful, well intentioned, and exist in order to help human beings. In most Indigenous contexts, these other-than-human-persons are incredibly powerful. Powerful beings are not necessarily easy to interact with, and if they’re powerful enough to help you, they are powerful enough to harm you. That element of danger and needing to be careful and respectful, is often missing. Not always, but there does often tend to be this assumption that engaging with these beings is always beneficial. Any Indigenous practitioner would be terrified by that approach.
Why do you think some people on psychedelics assume the natural beings they encounter are there to help them? Is it that they’re otherwise detached from the natural world? Do they think it will be like Cinderella being dressed by birds in the morning, while forgetting the powerful and sometimes violent qualities of nature?
It’s very anthropocentric. It’s interesting you go to Cinderella as the metaphor because in Edward Tylor’s original text, he also includes European peasants; Cinderella and other fairy tales are old folk tales from Europe. If you read the original Grimms stories, Cinderella’s birds are not kind, gentle, chirping happy birds. They actually go to peck out her stepsisters’ eyes. Even in the original Cinderella, animals used to be a little bit more powerful and scary, and they’ve been tamed and domesticated.
I think part of why people are newly attracted and drawn to ideas of animism is because we’ve reached a point in the climate crisis where we can’t ignore the fact that nature does have power over us. The modernist 20th century technological progress narrative was about subduing nature, and we’ve hit a point where we realized that all of that subduing has actually made it more dangerous. Look at hurricane Melissa that’s going on right now. That’s terrifying. This is a power that is greater than us. There’s something in traditional animist systems that acknowledges that power.
If someone’s beliefs do shift after taking psychedelics, would that change them in everyday life? Do you have any words of advice or caution for someone undergoing that shift?
Going back to my original definition, animism is about extending social relationships beyond the human so I think it can have tremendous impact in terms of relationships and obligations to the world around us. When you look, for example, at the protesters against the Keystone XL pipeline, the water protectors talked about how the water was their relative. They could no more sell out the land than sell their grandmother for profit. That’s not a metaphor, right? This is a person in their world that they have obligations to, and that is an intensely felt emotional tie that can motivate tremendous action and commitment.
But they live in a social context that values that, reinforces it, and when people say things like, “I have an obligation to protect my grandmother, the river,” people around them say, “Yes, this is good. You have to do that.” It goes back to what I was saying: Can you incorporate this into an everyday life in which that worldview is built into the way in which you interact with the world? That’s difficult for people who have a one-time psychedelic experience, and then go back to their office job in Brooklyn.
Because psychedelics were effectively illegal in the United States for so long it also creates a field, like shamanic tourism, where it’s easy for people to be exploited. I would tell people to be cautious, to think critically, and to think carefully about what kind of an environment you’re engaging in these practices. Think about how your presence, and your money impacts the community that you’re engaging with. This is someone’s religion, right? This isn’t just going to a clinic and picking up some pills. You are, in effect, going into someone else’s church and participating in their services. That should be done with a certain amount of care and respect, not just for them, of course, but also for yourself.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
