Animism
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I've been struggling for a while now to find a way to talk about autism and animism - the belief that natural objects, and other things that aren't people or animals, have minds of some sort.
It's intriguing to me that even as we are criticized for not understanding the intentions and desires of neurotypical people, a lot of us are also thinking very hard about the desires of our stuffed animals or dishes or favorite shirts, or of the plants and earth and other natural objects around us.
I feel like we don't talk about this very often, but there are corners where we talk about it. Tito Mukhopadhyay likes to talk about his sense that everything is alive. Mel Baggs had an intense connection to the mushrooms and rocks of hir local redwood forest. Dani Alexis has written about their outrage, as a child, at the idea of punching their pillow to release stress - how would you like it if someone just came into your bedroom and punched you?
A neurotypical using a deficit model could say that this is in some way the same problem as our “low empathy.” Like it’s a problem with the part of our brain that distinguishes what is and isn’t a person, what does and doesn’t have feelings. But I find that a boring way of looking at it, and also a bit of a self-defeating one. It’s the kind of thing where, if we have more feelings about something than an NT, we’re wrong; if we have less feelings about something, we’re also wrong. I’d rather assume that it’s not wrong and see where it takes us.
Because of course animism isn't only an autistic thing - it's present in spiritual traditions, old and new, from all around the world. Wiccans are being animist when they talk about working with the energy of a tree or rock or river. Marie Kondo, a Shinto practitioner, is being animist when she talks about thanking your household items and being kind to them even when you throw them away. Indigenous religions have animist traits more often than not, and I don't want to talk about that much because the last thing we need is more white people appropriating Indigenous traditions - but animism, in and of itself, is so widespread that it can't be said to belong to any particular religion. It might just be a common human trait.
It’s been a while since I belonged to an organized religion, but the more I try to figure out what my spirituality actually is, the more I get convinced that animism is part of it somehow.
(And of course, none of this is intended to erase autistic people who have a more practical, materialist view of the world. That's common too. You can easily say that animism is common in humans simply because people are wired to look for patterns, or to empathize as widely as we can, or whatever other reason. I'm not necessarily making claims here about what is or isn't externally real? I'm just saying this is a more common way to feel than we might realize.)
I've been thinking about animism more, over the past six months, as I gradually clean and re-organize my house into a new state.
This was my ex-partner's house before it was mine. It was all set up the way he preferred, and now I'm setting it up the way I do. It was full of his messes, and now I'm getting rid of them.
And I often find myself wondering what the house thinks of this slow, fraught, imperfect process. How does the house want to be treated? Is it angry when I don't clean up fast enough? Is it in pain from the repairs that it needs but that I'm still scrimping and saving to afford? Does it wish it still belonged to my ex?
You could say that this is me taking my own insecurities and projecting them onto the house. (This kind of cleaning is, as my girlfriend likes to say, "a journey to the center of the mind." If you say it, you are probably correct! Projecting is another thing humans do all the time. But most frequently, when we project our feelings, we project them onto an actual human, and it does not stop that human from continuing to have feelings of their own. So the fact that I am projecting does not necessarily mean that the house does not have feelings.
And secretly, I do think that the house is alive and has feelings. I think most houses do.
What do you think?