Angela Puca AP: Hello everyone, I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Today I have a special video for you I have here on my channel Rune Hjarnø, have I pronounced it right?
Dr Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen RHR: Yes that’s fine.
AP: OK. Rune is a Danish Anthropologist of Religion. He got awarded his PhD at Uppsala University in Sweden. He has lived and worked in many countries around the world. His research has mostly focused on Afro-Atlantic religions, particularly Brazilian Candomblé. Now he works on looking at the Nordic history of religions as a rejected form of animistic knowledge. Rune is also one of my Patrons on Patreon so thank you for that.
RHR: You’re welcome.
AP: And I really thank you for honouring me with your pledge. Plus he’s got his own fantastic YouTube channel which you absolutely have to check out and it will link a card here linking to Rune’s channel so go and check him out.
So hello Rune.
RHR: Hej Angela. Thanks a lot for inviting me to your channel. I’ve really been enjoying it, following your work.
AP: Thank you very much. Yeah, today Rune will tackle two important topics: Animism and Eco-Activism. What is Animism and how does it manifest?
RHR: Yeah, it’s a long story really. If you look at it from the scientific point of view then there’s quite an early trend in that part when you look at a religion to see Animism as a kind of fundamental form of religion, that other religions are sort of developed from. This is a kind of an evolutionist thinking, of course, and we don’t think like that anymore. But then what happened here in the last, I don’t know, maybe 20 years or something like that is that the concept of Animism came back into vogue, particularly the British scholar Graham Harvey coined the concept New Animism, New Animist Theory which is a way of looking at Animism that builds on specific anthropologists and so on and it sort of changes the way that we look at Animism, it has a more updated way of looking at it. Where formerly and often also what people, sort of commonsensically think, when they say Animism, is that Animism is the idea that everything has spirit, right? That’s what a lot of people think and that’s not exactly how we look at it today. Today it’s more when we follow writers like Graham Harvey, it’s more like the idea that there are persons distributed in reality and distributed perceptions and their different ways of understanding that, how that personhood emerges and what it’s made of, almost, you know. But there are persons, only some of whom the human this is Graham Harvey’s definition – they’re persons, only some of whom are human – but all of whom deserve respect. And what Harvey then focuses on is that this idea of respect is very fundamental to animist cultures or cultures where Animism is really strong.
But this is still, sort of, a focus on Animism as almost a belief system or typically as religious ideas that you find perhaps among indigenous peoples and so on. But in fact, the ideas of Animism can be understood, from the point of view of scholarship, can be understood in wider ways. I mean, is it really Animism, when we read in the newspapers that the Coronavirus is ‘ravaging’ in France or something like that because the Coronavirus is not a person, it’s not ravaging, it’s not a subject that is or what you, might say, we make it into a subjective thing, is that also a form of Animism? We can open any newspaper and you can find meteorological phenomena or economic structures, in headlines, that are said to be acting as if they were persons. So this is just one example is it Animism when we shouted our printer which is always dysfunctional the night before the deadline right? Is that also a kind of Animism? Perhaps it is, you know. Is it Animism when conspiracy theorists, they look at something in the world and then they ascribe it to motivation and personhood by creating a myth about clandestine groups of people who are making these and these things happen? Perhaps that’s also, in a sense, Animism. So Animism can be understood, and now I’m talking from the scholarly perception, can be understood and it can be used as an analytical tool to understand a lot of different things. Yeah.
AP: So basically Animism is believing that everything is populated by other than human people and interacting with them, is that right?
RHR: I wouldn’t say everything because when we say that when we say everything is inhabited by other than human people, now I think we’re making a little bit too strict of a rule. And I think the reality of it is that when when you go and if you visit people with strong animist ways of knowledge forms, then what you often find is that there are specific kinds of person that inhabit their reality and it’s not necessary every single tree and every single plant and every single bird that are perceived in this very personal way. Often it will be like these birds or these trees I, for instance, in Northern Europe elder trees, for some reason, has been really important and it’s all these kinds of folkloric ideas of elder trees and the beings that inhabit elder trees. I imagine it’s the same in England. But certainly in Germany and so on, Scandinavia and this is a kind of a contextual thing. Specific contexts have specific social structures, that’s the way it is between human beings, right? You know, Irish people live in different social structures than Yąnomamö people in the central Amazon, right? So and in the same way that these, Animism is the idea that we are socially entangled in persons with different kinds of personhood. So they’re differently structured in different contexts. Did that make sense?
AP: Yeah, yeah it absolutely did. Did you study Animism in one specific context like in one specific country and in a specific religion?
RHR: Well yeah, you could say that I used Animism in my way of understanding, particularly Afro-descended religions that, I did my research, my PhD research on the Afro-Brazilian region called Candomblé and when you, for instance, analyse how these deities, how they are brought into being because that’s really what these people doing they’re bringing deities into being, the deities real but they’re also brought into being by humans. That’s the sort of, for many Europeans or their descendants I think that is, somehow, very paradoxical. But for many people with ancestry in West Africa, it’s a very natural and logic thing, actually, that we create deities but they’re also somehow real and affect us and… Well, anyway, when you take Animism and then you look at, I think you could take Animism you can look at those processes, those in my research, I call it ‘dividuation,’ those processes that secrete deities into being by different ritual technologies.
AP: How did you call it in your research?
RHR: Dividuation. I had this concept primarily from this Israeli scholar called Nurit Bird-David who has written a very nice article “’Animism’ Revisited” and she talks about how subjectivity is really predicated on relation and also activity is really much more than an individuality, something that is secluded inside our modern, bounded self, it is a ‘dividuality’ – something that emerges in our relation with each other. So she is it herself or does she quote somebody else from saying ‘I relate, therefore I am.’ Point being, in relation to Animism, that when you when you’re producing, when you are bringing into being spiritual deities this often happens in rituals of engagement. So stuff like offering, sacrifice but also all kinds of engagement. You have a masked person who’s enacting a trickster spirit and then there’s a play going on, for instance, that is a way of bringing into being or creating engagement, creating relation and thereby basically feeling dividuality and thereby… Am I making sense or am I…?
AP: Yes, you are.
RHR: I am always a little afraid of talking inside these concepts so it becomes, what is it called in English? Hogwallop? Something like that?
AP: I can tell you are very passionate about the topic, which is a good thing, and it’s very typical among us crazy academics.
RHR: Yeah, totally, totally.
AP: So we clarified what Animism is and so now I’d like to ask you what is Eco-Activism then and yeah, what has been your field experience with it?
RHR: Well, I actually don’t have much field experience, particularly with Eco-Activism. Where the two things sort of touch is that Animism, by when Animism being the idea of a practice of respect between different persons, in reality, a lot of people feel and me too, that this idea, the idea of respect between people in the different kinds of people that inhabit reality, that this is a good conceptual scheme to, perhaps, create ways of relating to nature and to our environment that are a little bit less absolutely, catastrophically, cataclysmically, apocalyptically destructive than the ones that we practice in, sort of, normal, industrialized consumerism, right?
So a lot of people had this idea that perhaps Animism can give us pointers in that way. And this is not complicated, of course, because you know there are also a lot of cases of peoples who are Animists, who, indeed, go out and very, very efficiently destroy their own environment, that also happens. But I think if you look at Animism, not so much as a magical key that can, you know, solve a problem but more as a human attempt to sort of deal with the human propensity to, for instance, destroy nature and an attempt that can be more or less successful. You know, sometimes they work, perhaps, better than in our situations, then I think it is possible to think of Animism in a way that is, perhaps, not too essentialising, too monolithic and then sort of creates this, it has a kind of magical key.
So with regards to Eco-Activism, I think that I’m very convinced that the philosophical or theoretical structures that had been growing for, actually, quite some time in Animist theory. Some of the earliest Anthropologists, I think was all the way back in the 1960s and perhaps even 50s who started developing these ideas. It’s been around for quite some time and I think that it’s going to be, in the coming decade, we’re probably gonna see a very strong rise in these ways of thinking about the world. Where, for instance, we’re already seeing examples that people are granting legal personhood to a river. So and perhaps we’re going to see similar things happen with ecosystems, that people are gonna start legally treating ecosystems as actual communities and perhaps specific landscapes or animals might be given legal personhoods. So this is an example of where a kind of Eco-Animism actually goes and changes something.
AP: Do you feel that Animism is somehow helping a form of activism which preserves the ecosystem?
RHR: I think it could. It could and it should, and it will. I think that the ways of thinking about the world that are inherent to Animism. I think they have a strong potential for us to deal with the world and less destructive ways. But it’s also a matter of actualizing these ideas and thinking about them in that way. If you look at how many indigenous scholars when they practice indigenous studies and they look at their own knowledge tradition, they tend to actually see their own knowledge traditions as less environmentally destructive than settler industrialism. And it is probably possible to criticize these ideas and say okay so that’s the model, it is the essentialising thing and so on but you know people also allow to create their essentialisations of their own knowledge, of course, and part of what I’m sort of suggesting is that why don’t we do the same ourselves? And when I say ourselves I mean as majority populations. Why don’t we look at our own cultural history and basically try to consider where are the Eco-Animist content in our own cultural history? And from what I’ve experienced, from looking at Scandinavian cultural history, is a surprising amount, actually, of these very animist ideas that is, if you just scratch the surface a little bit and then you find these, you know, really iconic examples of Animism. For instance, in Scandinavia people used to actually apologize to animals before butchering them. So…
AP: That’s lovely.
RHR: Yes, it’s almost like the Inuit hunter who will be speaking to the Inua of a seal after killing it saying, you know, I’m sorry I had to kill you but my children will starve if they don’t get the meat. So I just want you to know that we’re good people where I come from and we’d really like to come, you should come and visit us another time. is. It’s an iconic sort of animist behaviour and you know, our great grandparents probably had that kind of scheme for how to interact with other people, in this case, people you eat, right?
AP: But if in Animism, even like plants are considered animated then even when you are eating a carrot you are eating the person somehow. So you should also apologise to the carrot, shouldn’t you?
RHR: Perhaps, perhaps. Well, as I said I’m not sure that it would be that systemic. Because what you actually see is that plants are often animated or dividuated as deities actually so you have stuff like a Maya corn deity, maze deity is from the Maya indigenous people in Guatemala Mexico, right? And then people will actually worship that plant as a God because it gives them life, so there’s a very important relating to that particular organism and you find the same thing in Northern Europe and I’m sure in other parts of Europe as well. I’ve just been looking at Northern Europe so that’s the examples that I have. But you’ll find for instance in Southern Scandinavian and northern Germany that the rye, corn called rye is really, really important and people had been actually having cults around the rye, in the process of harvesting it and creating basically an idol, a deity figure out of the rye, like physically and having very intense cultic interaction with it. There are even cases where this kind of corn deity would be brought into the woman of the house and she would have a symbolic, ritual intercourse with the rye god and then then the rye god would be made into a bread which would then be ritually born and stuff like, very intense ways of creating a relation between rye and in this case, the woman of a big farm.
AP: This is extremely interesting and also reminds me of the Pagan Sabbath Lughnasa or Lammas which occurs on the 1st of August and they normally tend to incorporate these European rituals and traditions regarding worshipping a grain God, basically and people interact with it urges it gets dismembered to feed the people.
RHR: Yes.
AP: So it’s very interesting to know that even in Scandinavia there’s this kind of old tradition and is it still going on? I mean do people still do that? Or is it just an historic thing that used to happen?
RHR; I don’t think people still do this. Not that I know of.
AP: Not even Pagans, like new….?
RHR: No, I don’t think, I don’t think anybody do that but I think that in Scandinavia, Scandinavia is Protestant or the dominant religion in Scandinavia is Protestantism and Protestantism, my impression is that Protestantism has been more disruptive to these, sort of, traditional forms of religion than Catholicism. And a lot of this kind of stuff has disappeared and it has disappeared in some cases, I think, surprisingly recently. That it has been there until, yes, very recently and then has sort of faded away quite quickly. I think modernity also plays an important part – the combination of Protestantism and modernity has been really, really hard on local animist knowledge forms. And I think Scandinavia is also very modern, the attitude to, for instance, to religion is very modern. Scandinavian societies are, or perhaps they understand themselves as very secularized and so that means that there’s not a lot there. You can still find some, of course, but compared to what was there say 200 years ago, it’s very, very little.
AP: I think it’s still interesting from a historical perspective and since I study Pagans in the contemporary world, I do see how these old traditions are still affecting them somehow. So maybe in the culture at large people are not practising and carrying on these kinds of traditions but at the same time, they have been incorporated in new religious movements such as Paganism. So that is interesting, as I said, it is basically very similar to what happens at Lughnasa or Lammas for Pagans who follow the Wiccan Wheel of the Year. So that’s very fascinating.
RHR: Yeah, I think it’s very, the way that contemporary Pagans are sort of working creatively with these traditions. This is somehow, I think, fascinating and really amazing to watch. I actually, I made a… and this was partly inspired in fact by the whole indigenous knowledge side of things, where many indigenous peoples, they create these wheels of seasons as ways to sort of re-emerge themselves or keep contact with traditional knowledge forms. So I actually made kind of an almanac or calendar where I try to get a little bit of an overview of Nordic animist traditions from around the year. I think I have it on the wall, if it’s visible, you may see it.
AP: Yeah, can I see it.
RHR: Yeah I’m gonna move this [he moves the camera]. Is it visible?
AP: I can’t quite see properly. But… yeah, now it’s a bit better.
RHR: Anyway, that was just an attempt to sort of make people aware and also make the new Pagans aware of all these wonderful traditions. Because my impression was that there was so much material that they weren’t aware of and that, yeah, I just felt like a lot of people were thinking that back in the day people probably spend all their life brewing sacred beer and having ritual sex on Bronze Age rock carvings and dancing around in the meadows with flowers and I just wanted to let people know that that’s true!
AP: You will turn more people to Paganism now. They will have one more reason to convert to this new religious movement. And I want to know, I am really interested in this wheel that you draw. So what is it representing? I mean are there like the festivals? Like the eight festivals, like in a Wiccan tradition or is it different? Is it not representing festivals at all? What is this wheel representing?
RHR: That particular design is quite condensed and I basically try to take some different parts of traditional reckoning in putting it together. So one of the parts is what is called a runic calendar where there are two runic lines; one of them represents a week-year which is an ancient way of reckoning the solar years with those runes representing, in a sense, the solar cycle and the others represent the lunar-year, so it represents the phases of the Moon. And then there are specific kinds of symbols that mark specific holidays they called ‘primestaff symbols’ because they are found, these calendar stops, particularly from Norway, where different holidays around the year are marked with these beautiful and totally occult looking little symbols. And then there are, also in the centre of this particular design, there also some different sorts of templates for how to actually read that calendar. So that’s how it’s but I’ll give you a link to some of that stuff and it’s not like, you mentioned.
AP: Yeah, like yeah what kind of sources did you use to reconstruct this kind of wheel?
RHR: What kind of sources?
AP: Yeah, like historical, specific historical sources or…
RHR: Yeah it is well, It’s difficult because different periods of history had different ways of reckoning. So I basically just wanted to say, okay if I wanted to sort of communicate some of this traditional animist knowledge to people then I have to sort of look through history a little bit and kind of, take out the animist parts and say okay, so this is an example of North European Animism. But that also means that it goes through different parts and because, so one, for instance, the runic calendar that I told you about, right now. That is actually a contemporary runic calendar, it’s made for today and it has to be because it has to represent the lunar phases. If you just take a lunar calendar from the Middle Ages, take it out and look at it today, then it won’t work, it would just be mumbo-jumbo because the rune that’s supposed to represent the new moon in a given year like, for instance, now 2020 will not actually be on the new moon in a different place because there’s some imprecision in how the whole thing works.
And so I took a contemporary one that fits today. Then I used folkloric, some folkloric material. I particularly found one very amazing book that happens to address here which is called… Let’s not worry about what it’s called, let’s call this just an old folkloric survey from, you know, the mid 20th century when folklorists were still making these whole solar surveys and it’s kind of antiquated from a research point of view but if your purpose is not to create a piece of research but to make material available for people to be fascinated by and to dialogue within and to relate with it, then these kinds of old research can sometimes be really wonderful. So that’s an important source and then I have some different scholarship on different parts of history in order to, sort of, create that thing.
AP: That’s very interesting. Yeah so back to Eco-Activism then. I think that I quite agree with you that Animism can actually help us understand and perceive and conceptualize our world in a different way. In a way that somehow makes us more embedded in the world rather than dominating our surroundings. So where do you think this is going to bring us with the future of the relation between Animism and Eco-Activism? How the tool will develop in the future I mean in your opinion?
RHR: I’m actually not sure. I just, I think what I’m trying to do is basically I’m trying to take bits and pieces of Animist knowledge, that I find appealing and then I try to bring them out from this perspective a little bit. And then I don’t have a very clear objective for exactly where this is going to bring us. Sometimes when you look at traditional animist knowledge then I think it is very obvious that you can take a very strong eco-perspective on it and sometimes it’s less obvious. A very obvious idea was that I was the anchorperson in a group of scholars who were also working with this and we were writing a series of articles in the biggest national newspaper in Denmark where we were basically saying, hey we have to look at our own traditional knowledge and in our way of dealing with climate change and sustainability collapse.
And in one of these articles, we were actually dealing with a pre-Christian heathen myth of the Ragnarok and when you look at the myth of the Ragnarok there are very strong analytical positions, I think, that see the Ragnarok as a reaction-action to climate waiting that had happened in the centuries before and around the time of the composition of his poem. So the poem represents a collapse of the world, from, you know, medieval Iron Age people’s perspective, but people who actually experienced a very, very radical climate change. What happened in Scandinavia in, I think, was the 6th century. In the 6th century was that there was a cooling, there was a cooling of the climate because there was some global cooling actually, it just hit northern Europe very, very hard and you find areas in Norway where not 90% of human activity disappears, half the population of Sweden disappeared and that must have been a very, very violent and catastrophic in human, you know, a cataclysm of incredible dimensions. And this myth the Ragnarok that represents, many people think, the kind of a mythological reflection on the human consequences of climate change. And so that there’s a very direct sort of climate change voice. It probably speaks about climate change. It speaks about it in a different time, of course, but that’s what prophecies are, they emerge in some time and often they emerge retrospectively, they emerge at some point where somebody is, you know, back projecting, somebody who foresaw something that’s actually happening when the prophecies being made. They saw it emerge in this play with time. But then their relevance emerged, re-emerged down through time.
So all of a sudden, you know, there are millenarian movements who think that now Jesus is going to come back or whatever it is and this kind of happens with a certain frequency down through history and so you could say, well this ancient prophecy perhaps speaks to our time, in a sense, it was created another time but its voice has become acutely, urgently relevant today. So this is just an example that we’re trying to say, something very direct. We try to take part of our traditional knowledge and bring it up as something that is urgently relevant for our situation today. Yeah, that’s one example and where exactly this goes, I don’t know but where I hope it goes is that people would increase their sense of urgency with the pending climate collapse.
I mean everybody has been all, it’s been a huge thing with the Corona crisis but really the Corona crisis is an extremely small thing compared to the climate collapse that we’re looking at. We’re looking at like was it in 50 years, that huge parts of the Middle East and the belt around the equator is going to be uninhabitable to human beings. The cataclysm is of a scale that we can’t hold in our minds. I think we can use, that’s part of the problem with climate change, the catastrophe that we’re looking at is so extreme that people cannot hold it in their minds. They cannot relate to something which is that extreme and perhaps these mythological languages, the way they emerge, the way they speak is predicated on actually speaking to real human beings, actually reaching human beings right? And a 900-pages-long climate report from some UN agency that doesn’t reach anybody, nobody reads it, you know. But mythological language that speaks of collapse and brothers that kill each other and everything burns down and the trolls of fire scorch the earth and the tree of life burns and all that stuff. These are images that have a chance of actually reaching and touching people and so this is one example where I think that these parts of traditional knowledge might be able to actually do something positive.
AP: Do you think that a mythological narrative of the world, if it becomes widespread, it could help our ecosystem?
RHR: Yes, for instance, if animist mythologies become more widespread then I think they can potentially help our ecosystems. Again it’s not simple, you know, there is probably a kind of Animism that underlies when Hindus don’t kill cows and it’s not necessarily always 100% positive for the ecosystems. But I think if it is handled in the right ways and if we enter into dialogue with these parts of our cultural history, with the consciousness of where are we going and what we need, then I think that that they can help us.
AP: That’s very fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing that thought.
RHR: You’re welcome.
AP: So this is it for today’s interview. I really thank Rune so much for being here and sharing his knowledge with us.
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Bye for now.
Check out Rune’s Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Runehr
First uploaded 16 May 2020