How can it be that things are animate? It has to do with the way that subjectivity (the "being person") and agency (the "being able to act" in the world) is actually not as confined to humans as modern thinking has let us to believe. These qualities are more distributed throughout reality. Personhood and Acting on the world is particularly there in RELATION! From one perspective that is what a spirit or a deity is. It is subjective agency that inhabits relation – personhood acting in our relatedness.

LITERATURE

Bird-David, Nurit. ‘“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology’. Current Anthropology 40, no. S1 (1999): S67–91.


Ochoa, Todd Ramón. Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba. 1 edition. University of California Press, 2011.

Vetlesen, Arne Johan. Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism. 2020.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998): 469–88.