Photo by Rick Wicker: Ahayu:da:, Zuni war god statues meant to be returned to the earth to decompose, returned to the Zuni in 1986 after a century of negotiations with the Denver Museum.

Note: If you haven’t read this summary of David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, you might not be able to make as much sense of this post. If you’re interested, read that here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/411

Are Our Objects Inanimate?: Making and Animism

A wide array of philosophical and media-theoretical projects have addressed the agency of objects or the vitality of matter. The object of this paper is to reconcile Tim Ingold’s ideas of correspondence and currents of matter outlined in Making with David Abram’s Indigenous understanding of animism grounded in ecological reciprocity. To understand the seams and convergences between these two modes of thought is to answer the question: how does making affect objects and animateness? For the purposes of this paper, I will use the words “objects” “materials” and “matter” somewhat interchangeably to refer to natural or human-made things that we would consider inanimate.

Abram’s argument that “…we are human only in contact, and conviviality with what is not human” (Abram 10) rests on the understanding that our modern world of human-made objects and structures does not, at least as strongly, invite our senses into a reciprocal field of engagement with the world of non-human agents around us. To animistic cultures, that agency held by stones or rivers exists distinctly because they are more-than-human; that is to say, because they possess a certain otherness. They are so totally different and apart from us and our understanding that they can act as distinct agents with outside secrets and knowledge for us to learn as humans (Abram). An object made by a human, it seems, lacks this distance from human understanding. There is no mystery as to why a toaster exists in a kitchen, what its purpose is and why it does the things it does. It was made by humans, for humans, to fill a human purpose. A toaster can teach us nothing beyond our own mode of human thought.

But of course, all human-made things are, in some way or another, made out of the natural world. Our homes came from breathing trees, our pottery from the earthen banks of shimmering rivers. Even an object as inscrutably complex as an iPhone is, down to its every atom, composed of raw, natural material that once held a place in a more-than-human ecology. Even animistic cultures of the past and present certainly make all sorts of things and live in structures of their own design. Where, then, would Abram draw the line in the sand between our new ecosystem of near-exclusively human-made objects and the more-than-human world of nature? What happens, for instance, to our dynamic, reciprocal relationship with a tree when we cut it down and fashion it into a house?

In The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram does not see making as a clear-cut dead end for the otherness of human-made objects: “… our human-made artifacts inevitably retain an element of more-than-human otherness … [which] resides most often in the materials from which the object is made” (Abram 65). He argues, for instance, that the organic swirling grain of a tree trunk in a telephone pole, because it was not devised by humans, retains some element of dynamism that responds to our senses. Because his case for animism arises from the reciprocity of perception itself, Abram doesn’t argue for distinctions between “animate and inanimate phenomena, only for relative distinctions between diverse forms of animateness” (90). Discerning the ‘animateness’ of objects cannot, then, be a matter of drawing lines. To Abram, all human made objects, though lessened in their “more-than-human otherness,” all respond reciprocally to our senses and are thus all animate. Each have their own unique agency, some more responsive than others. What kinds of distinctions, then, can we make between these forms of animateness?

Ojibwe languages, for instance, categorize many objects along with human-made artefacts as persons (Harvey 34). The plethora of cultures that understand the world in ways that could be deemed animistic is inumerable, and conceptions of which objects are or are not animate shifts drastically from culture to culture. Even more puzzling, some cultures to whom objects are viewed as persons do not even view all animals as being persons or quite as having the same depth of animateness. An example of this phenomenon comes from none other than Tim Ingold himself. In an early work on ecology, he noted that to many arctic hunting societies, “dogs – along with other domestic animals – have no ‘other-than-human’ guardian, and hence they have no free-soul…” (The Appropriation of Nature, 255). Though certainly bizarre from our perspective, this example would seem to embolden Abram’s answer to the question of why human-made objects are not considered to have the same kind of animateness as natural ones. To these cultures, even an animal can lose its otherness to humans, and so become much akin to a human-made object. By growing up around humans and human lands, by fulfilling human goals and working for human purposes, these animals no longer possess an agency distinct from that of a human, no longer stand freely as mysterious foreign agents with their own unique knowledge to teach us.

So, how exactly are we changing the animateness of an object (or an animal, for that matter) when we make it into something that fills a human purpose? It isn’t gone completely, and as Abram points out, it can retain some visual dynamism, but as noted with the Ojibwe languages, even totally human-made objects can be viewed as persons which are still vividly and responsively animate. Perhaps, then, it depends on how an object is made. This is where, at last, we can bring in Ingold to understand objects and making. 

He argues in Making that humans are not the only ones to make with things in the world. Ingold sees no categorical difference between the slow dripping of water that forms a stalagmite and the mining of a quarryman that cuts a block of marble into a statue (Making, 22). To him, at the deepest level, both are simply examples of matter changing matter, of course with wildly differing levels of complexity. Humans are simply one of many agents that engage in the constant growing and changing of matter in the world. Making, then, would seem to be a way that humans engage in the reciprocal field of interaction between different more-than-human agents, not reject it. 

Although I have so far used the word agency to describe a not-necessarily-animistic way of understanding the ways that objects seem to “act” independently of us, Ingold would certainly take issue with this terminology. Contrary to thinkers like Jane Bennet, he argues “…humans do not possess agency; nor, for that matter, do non-humans. They are rather possessed by action” (Making, 97). In other words, when explaining how objects, natural or human-made came to be, it is more accurate to talk about things growing and changing in response to things around them, rather than enacting a pre-concieved intention onto them. Ingold would argue there is another word that we should use instead of agency: correspondence. I would argue there are two: correspondence and reciprocity. Ingold and Abram both have a word for this back-and-forth, cyclical relationship we have with things, where we respond to their form and qualities and they respond to our actions and so on until things have grown and changed.

Ingold’s term refers to the relationship between humans and objects, and Abram’s refers to the relationship between objects and their surrounding ecology. Both of these, to an animistic culture, are keys to why certain objects are or are not considered more responsively animate than others. In looking for a single trait or quality that an object does or doesn’t possess–in looking for ‘agency’–we have missed the essence of how objects make things grow and change in the world. It isn’t the result of a trait that allows them to exert some sort of will onto something, but instead the result of a certain kind of relationship with that ‘something’– a correspondent one, or a reciprocal one. Both are ways that an object can be deeply animate. 

To understand how Abram has come to the conclusion that many of our human-made objects have lost a depth of animateness, we must begin with the the time before we interact with objects–before they are turned into human-made things–to see how they already act in reciprocity with the world around them.

A stone is perhaps the proverbial “inanimate object,” the example most commonly given in contrast living things. A stone, most would say, is an inert, unresponsive thing, simply waiting for a human to kick it or throw it or make it into something useful. But perhaps we are blinded by our lack of attentiveness. If you look carefully, you may notice that a stone is not in fact unresponsive, but is a world of interaction–erupting with indecipherably complex entanglements of species of moss and lichen, teeming with factions of marching ants to whom that stone is a towering lookout, hiding beneath its base a dark world of isopods kept safe as they feast on fallen leaves. The stone exists in reciprocity with such a sprawling array of wildly different beings it would be near impossible to count them. 

Perhaps we are also blinded by our narrow view of time. Every stone in a river has a billion-year life story, perhaps more wild and harrowing than any of our human histories. Churning for eons in the fiery maw of the earth itself, erupting into the open air, transforming from blazing red to solid black, only to be bludgeoned to bits by centuries of wind and rain, caught then in a million-year dance with the rushing erosion of river currents, transfigured over millenia from flowing magma to jagged rock to smoothened stone. The lifetime of reciprocal relationships that stone has had with moss or wind or water outnumber the relationships in your life by orders of millions. This is what Ingold is referring to as the currents of matter–a process of constantly flowing, changing and intermingling in reciprocity as materials grow and transform. For these billions of years even before we had evolved, these objects lived vivid “lives” in reciprocity with the world of more-than-human things around them. This, I would argue, is more than grounds enough to view them as deeply, responsively animate.

Let us move onward, then, from before humans encounter an object to the moment a human makes with it. Ingold’s primary project in Making is rejecting the idea that making means imposing our pre-concieved designs onto objects. He argues, “the most [a maker] can do is to intervene in worldly processes that are already going on, and which give rise to the forms of the living world that we see all around us” (Making, 21). Just as Abram sees the animateness of an object in those aspects of its materiality that were not devised by humans, Ingold argues that we must work with that more-than-human materiality of an object in order to correspond with it. This reciprocal way of working and making wherein we respond to an object and it in turn responds to us allows what we might call the “agency” of an object to enact itself, rather than destroying it to act only for human purposes. That is to say, we correspond with the unique animateness of an object when we make with it. That specific animateness perhaps changes once it is made. “Finished” objects are no longer mysterious beings ‘living’ in reciprocity with a more-than-human ecosystem, and because their purpose has become primarily human, they have lost most of their otherness to us. Still, it is in what remains of their natural materiality, textures and forms that they maintain some sense of being animate. They can still, at times, surprise us, or seem to act against our will. 

Perhaps, then, some depth of animateness in our objects was maintained for most of human history, even though we made new things with them. They now existed for human purposes, but because we had yet to master machines and manufacturing, they had to be made in direct correspondence with their unique more-than-human qualities, and the otherness of the textures and shapes of nature were thus still very much intact. Moreover, many objects and structures would continue to serve not only humans, and left free to interact with the non-human forces of the elements. Their place in the ecosystem and the natural currents of growth and decay were worked with rather than fought. 

If animateness, then, is the ability to act against or other than human purposes in correspondence, and to be free to engage with and be changed by things that are not human in reciprocity, then we may be able to find the true downfall of the animateness of objects with the industrial revolution. 

Machines, factories and production chains allowed us the domineering control to truly destroy the ‘agency’ of an object. We could, down to the most minute detail, mass produce identical, rigidly designed products hyper-engineered to serve exclusively human purposes. No longer did we have to go out into the more-than-human landscape to gather material, and attend to the material qualities of the object in correspondence with our bodies. No longer were our objects a collaboration between human and material. We create entire labyrinthine networks of mechanical apparatuses, intricate machines and global supply chains, taking unfathomable amounts of space and energy to reject the innate, natural qualities of materials and force them to rigorously human-centric, functional forms. After all, what is the ultimate goal of mass-produced objects but to exist as perfect, isolated extensions of human agency? This anti-animate quality is the explicit goal of mass-produced and manufactured designs; to replace correspondence and reciprocity with extension and prosthesis. Abram outlines this precisely: “To the sensing body these artifacts are, like all phenomena, animate and even alive, but their life is profoundly constrained by the specific “functions ” for which they were built. Once our bodies master these functions, (…) we must con­tinually acquire new built objects, new technologies, the latest model of this or that if we wish to stimulate ourselves” (Abram 64). 

This new kind of human-made object, no longer other to human beings, no longer formally or texturally reminiscent of the organic, no longer serving any aim other than our own human will, have turned from vibrant more-than-human beings to extensions and prostheses of ourselves. As Abram argues, we may not perceive mass-produced objects through our senses as entirely inanimate, but we can certainly say that the practices of making that reject Ingold’s model of correspondence lessen to drastic extents the depth, vibrancy and agency of objects. Perhaps in a culture that views objects only in terms of what they can do for us rather than what they can do themselves, we have completely lost any remnant of the relationship with objects that makes them feel animate. I am, however, not entirely convinced.

There is some small part of you, and I, and perhaps every human being that experiences even mass-produced objects as having a personality, and can even feel empathy for them. Even, perhaps, your proverbial uncle Steve, who certainly has never heard of animism or any such ‘hippie nonsense’, might still give his beat-up old car a name. You, too, likely still consider the agency of objects, only when the TV refuses to turn on, when the shower “decides” it will be far hotter than you would like it or when the lawnmower seems to have no interest in starting. Indeed, even in our post-enlightenment consumer societies filled with mass-produced objects, we still have some strange impulse to view them as having agency. And, of course, we know, rationally, that they aren’t really alive. But we aren’t just hallucinating–we’re acknowledging a real relationship. Though objects are not “alive” as we would use the word, they can have a relationship to humans in which we negotiate with their seeming agency. This is an extension of Ingold’s correspondence, and what Abram might argue is core to how animist cultures experience the world. 

It seems, then, that our mass-produced objects regain those correspondent or reciprocal relationships with us and the world only when they are not functioning as intended; when they are old, broken down, rusting, mossy, dilapidated. Only when objects won’t do what we want are we are forced to acknowledge them as being able to act against us, or to interact with things other than us. And this is precisely what we seek to destroy. Our constant labour in the later stages of the lives of our new consumer objects is to “maintain”– to fix, to clean, to weed, to repair. To “maintain” a human-made object is to ensure that it does nothing that is not an extension of human will, and that it can interact with nothing that is not human. But this revulsion to old and abandoned things seems misguided. 

Have you ever come upon an abandoned plot of grass? You might notice how much more is going on there. Hundreds of species of flowering plants, worlds of insects, networks of pollinators—rustling with raccoons, swirling with birds, buzzing with bees–a breathing, bustling, growing, changing world of living things. In being freed from constant weeding and clearing, polishing and upkeep, our objects can at last wake back up to the reciprocal fields of more-than-human agents around them–and finally begin to do things other than what humans want them to. To us, perhaps a car that can no longer drive is unable to do anything. But a car abandoned on the side of the road now does countless more things than it could do as an extension of human agency. It blooms with grass and moss, erodes in response to wind and rusts with rain. It now houses squirrels and hosts entire civilizations of insects. It can now do all sorts of things. It now interacts and responds to a whole world of beings, instead of existing as slave to one.

An object, then, is viscerally animate for the vast eons of time before humans encounter it, existing in reciprocity with all of the other beings and forces in the ecosystem. It then gains a new kind of ‘animateness’ during the brief time it grows and changes in correspondence with a human maker. This “decay,” as we would call it, is the third stage of animateness for an object, but perhaps “growth” is more fitting a word. Our objects lead many new “lives”, years after us, free to engage reciprocally with a world of diverse relationships once again. 

All of these stages, as Ingold would argue, belong to the same process–that shifting, growing, changing, metamorphic nature of our world, of which we are briefly but another small part.  There is only one sliver of a moment in that vast life history of an object where it is not free to change. It is that tiny span of time when an object is “finished.” This is when it stops responding, shifting and growing, when it exists only for a human purpose, when its meaning is purely human. This, this tiny, fleeting moment is when an object loses its depth of animateness. It has been our goal, in industrial consumer society, to drag that sliver of time out as long as humanly possible–to make an object that never malfunctions, never decays and never changes. We aim for every object not to be another changing, free agent, but an eternal extension of ourselves.

It would seem, then, that our relationship to our creations is much like an abusive partner–never letting them change and grow, cutting off their relationships to everything else around them. And, in our culture, we might say this relationship is entirely justifiable–they’re just objects after all. But like all abusive relationships, they are toxic to both parties involved. We now live in a new ecosystem–a new interconnected network of made of human-made things–but we have learned nothing from other successful ecosystems. In seeing the material world of nature as a set of resources to be transformed to exclusively execute our will, we create an ecosystem waiting to die. We create a field of things that are optimized but not adaptable, seemingly permanent but not renewable, and that do not correspond with or account for the more-than-human forces that will inevitably destroy them. Unlike natural ecosystems which are shaped into delicate equilibrium by the ‘agency’ of countless different forces, our reclusive human-made world allows for only our own. 

Wild as they are, natural ecosystems have a multi-billion year track record. Let us not forget this. Let us not forget that our modern ecosystem of industrialized objects and structures markedly does not. Like every empire in human history, this new empire can fall far sooner than we think. And when it does, like every human empire, it will be eaten by those more-than-human ecosystems, swallowed by trees and grass and moss. 

We have always made with objects. That does not set us apart from animistic and Indigenous cultures, who learned to live alongside ecological relationships for time in memoriam. It does not set us apart from all the other agents in the ecosystem–wind and rain and earth, plants and animals–who all contribute to growth and change. Making is to engage and express creativity in the wildly intertwined currents of change in the world. It is only when our creations are too domineering, too permanent, too unsustainable, that they upset, overwhelm and overtake these currents–and ready them for collapse.

We have learned that animateness is not a singular trait or a one-track spectrum, but a relationship of reciprocity or correspondence between objects, humans and non-humans that shifts and changes throughout the ‘life’ of a material. This quality of animateness is never quite lost, only made monotonous and unresponsive by human-centric mass-production.

If we have any desire to stick around, we must learn to make in correspondence with these animate qualities of the world. We must learn to make attentively; pay attention to what a material can teach us about itself, rather than forcing it to do precisely what we want. We must, as Abram says, attend to “the wild, earth-born nature of the materials” (22). We must also leave the door open for our creations to be changed by the world around them, and to be influenced by beings other than ourselves. We must create things that are free to change, to die, to be eaten by the world and be used by something new. As is the basic tenant of animism as a practice–we must have some respect for the things around us. 

Perhaps we must do this because objects are not so different from ourselves. We arose from the same currents of ever changing, ever shifting matter. We will soon return to them. We might not be animists, but perhaps there is wisdom to be learned from animist cultures. As Abram notes, “The “body” – whether human or otherwise- is not yet a mechanical object in such cultures, but is a magical entity, the mind’s own sensuous aspect, and at death the body’s decomposition into soil, worms and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born” (15). 

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human world. Pantheon, 1996.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Harvey, Graham. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Acumen, 2013.
Ingold, Tim. The Appropriation of Nature. University of Iowa press, 1986.

Written by Daniel Schatz