Abstract

If we take on board the classic Durkheimian (1995 [1915]: 208) notion that religions and societies reflect and maintain one another—that societies create “God” in their own image—it is unsurprising that animism’s popularity as a religious path, often referred to as the “new animism” (Harvey, 2005, 2013), is growing amid current global anxieties about the destruction of natural environments, species depletion and extinction, pollution and climate change. This is happening even as many indigenous heirs of the world’s traditional animisms find themselves increasingly absorbed into cosmopolitan societies and urban contexts where their worldviews are a minority and access to traditional territories, food sources, trans-generational knowledge and lifeways is now more difficult, diminished or threatened. Many indigenous heirs of animism and non-indigenous “new animists” find themselves configuring heterodox paths within the cosmopolitan societies they now inhabit—embracing worldviews which are arguably broadly similar to one another, but needing to negotiate the fallout from the ongoing, often fraught socio-politics of indigenous/non-indigenous relations over the last half century and more.