--- title: "What did Nurit Bird-David say about animism as relational knowing?" description: "The anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, who began working in 1978 with a forest hunter-gatherer Nayaka community of South India, argued in her 1999 essay \"'Animism' Revisited\" that animism is not a mistaken belief about spirits but a way of knowing through…" url: "https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/wiki/what-did-nurit-bird-david-say-about-animism-as-relational-knowing/" updated: "2026-11-10" category: People tags: - A. Irving Hallowell - Animism Revisited - direct experience - dividual - Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - Gísli Pálsson - Graham Harvey - Nayaka - new animism - "Nurit Bird-David" - ontological turn - personhood - relational epistemology - Stewart Guthrie - Stone People - superpersons - talking with trees - Tim Ingold --- # What did Nurit Bird-David say about animism as relational knowing? The anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, who began working in 1978 with a forest hunter-gatherer Nayaka community of South India, argued in her 1999 essay "'Animism' Revisited" that animism is not a mistaken belief about spirits but a way of knowing through relationship. Where the modern scientist knows a tree by cutting it into parts, the Nayaka know it by "talking with" it, attending to how it responds to them and they to it: "I relate, therefore I am." Therapeutic Shamanism shares her starting point, that animism is lived and experienced, not believed, and goes further on whether consciousness depends on our relating to it. ## Who is Nurit Bird-David? A professor of anthropology at the University of Haifa in Israel, who took her doctorate in social anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1983.^[1](#note-1) She began working with the Nayaka in 1978, "a decade before governmental and nongovernmental agents reached them".^[1](#note-1) In 1978-79 the community she worked with was a forest hunter-gatherer Nayaka group of fewer than seventy people, living at five sites in a forested valley of the Nilgiri region of South India.^[2](#note-2) Her early work proposed that the confidence of such peoples comes from experiencing the forest as a giving parent that shares with them as kin share with each other,^[3](#note-3) and her later book *Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World* (2017) returns to the Nayaka.^[1](#note-1) See [Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is "the original affluent society"?](/wiki/who-was-marshall-sahlins-and-what-is-the-original-affluent-society/) 1. Nurit Bird-David, personal page, University of Haifa (read 9 November 2026). 2. Nurit Bird-David, "'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology", *Current Anthropology* 40, Supplement (February 1999), pp. S67-S91. 3. Nurit Bird-David, "Beyond 'The Original Affluent Society': A Culturalist Reformulation", *Current Anthropology* 33(1), 1992. ## What did "Animism Revisited" argue? That anthropology had misunderstood animism from the beginning. From Edward Tylor onwards, scholars treated it as an error of 'primitive' thinking, people wrongly believing that things have spirits. A newer version, from the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, explains it as an evolved reflex, on the reasoning that it is better to mistake a shadow for a living creature than the other way round. Bird-David called Guthrie's theory "ingeniously simple" but "weak in its own terms", since a startle at a shadow cannot explain why animism lasts and stands at the centre of whole cultures.^[4](#note-4) Her alternative was that animism is a way of knowing, a relational epistemology. If "cutting trees into parts" sums up modern knowledge, "talking with trees" sums up Nayaka knowledge. Talking with is not speaking one way to a tree as if it could listen and understand; it is "two-way responsive relatedness", paying attention to how the tree behaves and responds as the relationship goes on over time, and to the changes in oneself.^[4](#note-4) Against [Descartes](/wiki/what-did-descartes-teach-about-mind-and-body-and-why-do-animists-reject-the-split/)'s "I think, therefore I am", she set "I relate, therefore I am" and "I know as I relate".^[5](#note-5) And she reversed the usual explanation, holding that people do not first imagine that something is a person and then socialise with it, but "personify them as, when, and because we socialize with them."^[4](#note-4) 1. Graham Harvey, *Animism: Respecting the Living World* (Hurst, 2005), Chapter 1, "From Primitives to Persons", pp. 15-16 and 20-21, quoting Bird-David's 1999 essay. 2. Nurit Bird-David, "'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology", *Current Anthropology* 40, Supplement (February 1999), pp. S67-S91. ## Which beings are persons for the Nayaka? Those that act towards people. She chose not to translate the Nayaka word for such beings as 'spirits', which carries the Western split between spirit and body, nor as 'supernatural beings', which carries Western ideas of nature, and suggested 'superpersons'.^[6](#note-6) Her clearest example is two stones standing among the huts. One woman said a particular stone "came towards her" whilst she was digging for roots in the forest; another had one "jump onto" her lap as she rested under a tree. The two women had brought the stones back to their places to live with them. The many other stones around were simply stones.^[7](#note-7) In Harvey's reading of her elephant stories, an elephant is met as a person when it engages with people and not when it is indifferent to them. Persons show one another that they are persons by the way they act towards one another.^[7](#note-7) She also borrowed from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern the idea of the 'dividual', a person made up of their relationships rather than a self-contained individual, to describe how Nayaka people understand themselves as inseparable from the others they share with.^[6](#note-6) 1. Graham Harvey, *Animism: Respecting the Living World* (Hurst, 2005), Chapter 1, "From Primitives to Persons", pp. 15-16 and 20-21, quoting Bird-David's 1999 essay. 2. Harvey, *Animism*, Chapter 6, "Signs of Life and Personhood", pp. 101-102 and 106-107, quoting Bird-David's 1999 essay. ## What did her critics say? The essay was published with seven responses, and several pushed back. The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argued that she had turned a question about what exists into a question about how we know; for him animism is an ontology, not just an epistemology. The anthropologist Gísli Pálsson argued that contrasts such as individual and dividual, thing and relation, bring back the very dualisms she wanted to escape, and called 'dividual' a fashionable and rather scholastic synonym for a person. Others asked why people come to see the world this way at all.^[8](#note-8) In her reply, Bird-David restated how relational ways of knowing have challenged the Cartesian idea of detached objective knowledge, and made clear that her argument was twofold: about one community in which relational knowing carries authority, and about relational ways of knowing that continue in modern life even where they have lost that authority.^[9](#note-9) See [Who is Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and what is perspectivism?](/wiki/who-is-eduardo-viveiros-de-castro-and-what-is-perspectivism/) 1. Nurit Bird-David, "'Animism' Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology", *Current Anthropology* 40, Supplement (February 1999), pp. S67-S91. 2. Harvey, *Animism*, Chapter 1, pp. 21-22. ## Why does her work matter to the new animism? It gave the field one of its central ideas. The scholar of religion Graham Harvey builds his account of the new animism on Hallowell's "other-than-human persons" and on her relational reading, and the anthropologist Tim Ingold took it further, arguing that people everywhere perceive the world responsively because they are already caught up in relationships with it.^[10](#note-10) See [Who is Graham Harvey, and what is the new animism?](/wiki/who-is-graham-harvey-and-what-is-the-new-animism/) and [What is the ontological turn in anthropology?](/wiki/what-is-the-ontological-turn-in-anthropology/) 1. Harvey, *Animism*, Chapter 1, pp. 21-22. ## How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? At the starting point. Hunter-gatherers did not only believe the world around them was alive and conscious; they experienced it that way, and saw themselves as part of the natural world, not separate from it.^[11](#note-11) Shamanism, in the same way, is about direct personal experience, not an act of faith, and the question of whether the shamanic realms are real is answered by journeying, not by argument.^[12](#note-12) Bird-David's "talking with trees" describes knowledge gained in relationship over time. The two also meet on the place of humans. Animist peoples lived as one species in a community of species, and spoke of the other species as kin.^[11](#note-11) Among the Peoples**The Peoples.** The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. [Read the full answer](/wiki/who-are-the-animal-plant-and-stone-people/), humans are the youngest and least wise, and the relationship is not hierarchy but family.^[13](#note-13) Bird-David's Nayaka, who live in a world of relatives, are an example of what that looks like in daily life. See [What is kinship, and why do animists extend it beyond humans?](/wiki/what-is-kinship-and-why-do-animists-extend-it-beyond-humans/) 1. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter One, "Abandoning Hunter-Gathering". 2. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Three, "Real, Not Imaginary". 3. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter One, "Showing Some Humility". ## Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? On whether a being's personhood depends on its relating to us. In Bird-David's account, one stone becomes a person in coming towards a woman, whilst the stones around it remain simply stones. In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious; the difficulty is only that people struggle to recognise consciousness in things very different from themselves.^[14](#note-14) The stones that did not come towards anyone are conscious too. Relationship is how that consciousness is met and known, and because everything is alive and conscious, everything can in principle be communicated with.^[15](#note-15) So where the essay locates personhood in the moment of relating, the teaching locates it in what things already are, and treats relating as the way in. 1. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Two, "What Is 'Spirit'?". 2. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Two, "Ordinary Reality and Shamanic Reality". - [Who is Graham Harvey, and what is the new animism?](/wiki/who-is-graham-harvey-and-what-is-the-new-animism/) - [Who was A. Irving Hallowell, and where does the phrase "other-than-human persons" come from?](/wiki/who-was-a-irving-hallowell-and-where-does-the-phrase-other-than-human-persons-come-from/) - [Is giving things human personalities the same as animism?](/wiki/is-giving-things-human-personalities-the-same-as-animism/) - [Who is Tim Ingold?](/wiki/who-is-tim-ingold/) - [What is the ontological turn in anthropology?](/wiki/what-is-the-ontological-turn-in-anthropology/) - [What did Jerrold Katz say about animist sentences as nonsense?](/wiki/what-did-jerrold-katz-say-about-animist-sentences-as-nonsense/) - [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/) (Chapter Two, what Spirit is; Chapter Three, direct experience) - [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/) (Chapter One, hunter-gatherers and the community of species) - [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/) (Chapter One, the Peoples as family) - [all courses](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/shamanic-courses/)