Session Abstract

In recent years, scholars have embraced the category “animism” as a solution to pressing global ecological problems. Celebrating the notion of spirited matter, this “new animism” scholarship often romanticizes indigenous ways of life while criticizing modern epistemologies. As part of this trend, many scholars have turned to Japan as an example of a society that exhibits all the characteristics of modern consumer capitalism, but still retains an allegedly indigenous “animism” that underlies national culture and religion. Many of these scholars have suggested, explicitly or implicitly, that an “animistic” awareness of non-human personhood has revolutionary potential in the Anthropocene. Such notions, however, lack empirical substantiation. They also reproduce problematic binary oppositions.

This panel is a workshop-style session. The three presenters discuss their collaborative book project, in which they critically assess and rethink the category “animism” in scholarship on East Asia (primarily but not exclusively Japan). The first paper, co-authored and co-presented by all three, discusses the existing scholarly tropes surrounding “animism” and argues for an alternative approach that focuses on human practices of animating and de-animating. The second paper, by Aike Rots, is a comparative analysis of rituals involving non-human animals, in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. The third paper, by Yulia Frumer, challenges cultural essentialist claims about the famed Japanese robotics, and suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing robot personhood. The fourth paper, by Jolyon Thomas, analyzes animated films and other media featuring themes concerning nature, spirits, and allegedly ensouled objects. Finally, our discussant, Laurel Kendall, will provide comments on each of the papers.

Individual Papers

“New Animism” and Its Pitfalls

Yulia Frumer, Aike P. Rots, and Jolyon Baraka Thomas

The first paper introduces the category “animism” and its meanings, from nineteenth-century social evolutionism to twenty-first-century “new animism”. Originally used as a pejorative descriptor for people who did not “properly” distinguish spirit from matter, in today’s usage animism often describes an ontological orientation that ostensibly offers alternative ways of conceptualizing relations between human and non-human actors in the Anthropocene, thus helping to solve the global environmental crisis. However, this recuperative framing obscures uneven power dynamics. Attempts to link “animism” to indigeneity downplay the fact that the Japanese polity assumed dominance by subjugating indigenous peoples, for example, while claims of “Japanese animism” often mark specific ideas as immune to critique and serve to justify essentialist differentiation projects—e.g. an imagined Japanese animistic “forest civilization” placed in binary opposition to a reified “West” that seeks to suppress and exploit.

We argue that the inherent a-historicity of the “animism” framework absolves scholars from acknowledging particular historical contexts, and lends itself to be used as a magical fix for complicated social problems such as climate crisis or demographic decline. Seen from an environmental justice perspective, such narratives may in fact be counterproductive. By turning away from animism as ontology towards an examination of practices of animating and de-animating, we aim to re-historicize the experience of enchantment, while challenging discursive constructions of “animism” as a core feature of a reified national culture. This allows us to reveal ideological motives, uncover hidden labor and psychological manipulation, and pay closer attention to issues of maintenance and disposal.

Rituals as Techniques for Animation and Deanimation

Aike P. Rots, University of Oslo

This paper begins by highlighting the problems inherent in identifying ritual practices in Asian places as animism. It argues that the category functions in an academic discourse of differentiation, contrasting essentialized worship traditions with their imagined cultural and epistemological Others. Depending on the author, these Others can be “the West”, “monotheism”, or “modern capitalism”. One problem of such binary oppositions is that they lead interpreters to idealize and dehistoricize Asian indigenous cosmologies and rituals, overlooking the fact that these, too, are shaped by modern colonialism and capitalism.

While “animism” is problematic, notions of animation, transformation, and deanimation are arguably more helpful for understanding ritual practices in Asian places, past and present. In her book Mediums and Magical Things (2021), Laurel Kendall discusses ritual techniques for animating and deanimating objects in different Asian places. Building upon her work, this paper argues that the mediation and transformation of powerful non-human agency constitutes a core aspect of ritual practices in the region. It discusses four ritual techniques for animating and reanimating elements of the natural environment, including non-human animals: 1) deification (re-animating powerful actors by turning them into gods); 2) spirit mediumship (repairing relationships by animating non-human actors); 3) ritual care for dead non-human animals (a technique of de-animation); and 4) the attribution of moral and legal personhood to non-human actors (animation through discursive action). The paper provides examples of each, drawing on my ethnographic research on whale worship in Vietnam and Japan as well as secondary literature on other parts of Asia.

History and Ethics of Engineered Love

Yulia Frumer, Johns Hopkins University

Contrary to the claims that Japanese people are naturally predisposed to love robots because of the animistic nature of Shintō, this presentation argues that the “love” of robots is a product of meticulous engineering. The discourse that ties robotics to Shintō traces back to the late 1970s, when the Japanese government began funding humanoid robotics research in an attempt to create a technological fix to labor shortages in the service sector, and when Japanese intellectuals attempted to reclaim a sense of national pride by casting robotics engineering as a national technology. The lovability of robots, this presentation argues, was a result of engineers’ realization that service labor involves emotional labor. This realization required engineers to study human psychology and to learn how to modify robotic design to appease customers’ emotional expectations. In other words, robots are loved not because of the inherent animism in Japanese culture, but because Japanese engineers learned how to animate inanimate machines. Uncovering human agency behind robots’ lovability also exposes a series of ethical concerns. Design characteristics that tend to elicit positive responses often build on and reinforce gender biases. The illusion of automation conceals the need for maintenance and devalues human labor. And the preference for robotic labor over immigrant labor capitalizes on xenophobic tendencies. Denying human agency in animating the robots amounts to wishful thinking that lovable robots are going to “automatically” solve Japan’s social ills without the need to resort to unpalatable reforms.

Deus Ex Machina: Animation as A Technology for Making Spirits

Jolyon Baraka Thomas, University of Pennsylvania

Based on the record-smashing box office successes of such films as Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away and Shinkai Makoto’s Your Name, some anime researchers have posited a causal relationship between animism and animation. Citing the intimate relationships between humans, nature, and spirits that appear in these films, the researchers claim that these leading directors have tapped into an abiding “animistic” cultural substrate in Japan. Furthermore, because animism and animation derive from the same Latin root meaning “soul,” these scholars argue that anime is animism (or at least that anime is an ideal medium for transmitting “animistic” values). My presentation takes a different approach, showing that “animism” is not an accurate analytical tool for studying anime. Animism is misleading in part because the term shrouds globally popular media in an aura of Orientalist mystique. But animism is also misleading because it focuses on media content while downplaying media form. Accordingly, I focus on animation as a process rather than animism as a noun. By describing the machines and techniques that filmmakers use to bring narratives and characters to life, I show that how anime is made matters at least as much as the messages animated films transmit. Thus, rather than making the ultimately unprovable claim that an ahistorical Japanese animism is revealed to audiences through anime, I show that how filmmakers encourage audiences to suspend disbelief provides a useful model for understanding how inert objects or images can be ensouled.