Reviews:
"The strengths of this book are its fluid and engaging ... writing; its openly committed stand on the central question, i.e., whether or not animals, plants, rivers, etc. are people, and its use of major ethnographic sources as evidence, together with conversations with indigenous peoples."
Stewart Guthrie, Fordham University, author of Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press, 1995)

"Harvey's insightful and balanced study challenges both earlier studies of animism and more recent critics who argue that scholars should throw out the term altogether. This is a fascinating and passionate study of lifeworlds in which things are 'very much alive' and in which relation to non-human others is considered central."
Sarah M. Pike, California State University, Chico, author of Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (University of California Press, 2001)

For more reviews, click here

For my animist blogs on the New Statesman's "Faith Column" (Feb-March 2007)
click here (for the February blogs and you'll find the link to the March ones)

For some photos and links from the Green Man Festival 2007, including the "Strange Attractor Salon", click here

For more about me and my work see my other website: grahamharvey.org

to contact me, email: g.harvey@open.ac.uk

Site last updated: 27 March 2008

Welcome to Animism: Respecting the Living World, a companion website for my book by the same name. The site expands upon the book and includes further discussion, examples, elaborations and incitements that will enable more fruitful discussions about these ways of living respectfully within the wider community that is the living world.

First, a definition: "Animism is the attempt to live respectfully as members of the diverse community of living persons (only some of whom are human) which we call the world or cosmos."

Particular groups of animists express and evolve their worldviews and lifeways in various ways. These have considerable relevance to important debates among academics in many disciplines and among many other groups of people.