The Earth as a Gift-Giving Ancestor

Nietzsche’s Perspectivism and African Animism

Bibliographic Data

ID6349841
AuthorsAnatoli Ignatov (Appalachian State University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume45
Issue1
Pages52-75
Publication date2017-02-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0090591716656461
OpenAlexW2473766033
LanguageEN
Citations received7

This article puts into conversation Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism and a particular expression of “African animism,” drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana. Nietzsche’s perspectivism extends interpretation beyond the human species into natural processes. Like perspectivism, African animism troubles the binaries—body/soul, nature/culture—that permeate anthropocentric thinking. Human-nonhuman relations are refigured as socio-ecological relations: the earth may be regarded as life-generating ancestors; baobab trees may approach humans as kin. These two images of the world intersect, but they do not mesh together. Nietzsche adopts perspectivism as active intersections between dynamic processes, within an open universe that has not been predesigned for humans. Animism tends toward a world of personalized relationships that would reach harmony if we would only lighten our ecological footprint. I draw upon such resonances to advance a new ethic of experiential environmentalism that treats ecological threats as lived risks and shared experiences with a lively and communicating “environment

Animism · Anthropocentrism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Falsity · Interpretation (philosophy · Perspectivism · Sociology · African cultural and philosophical studies · Anthropology · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics

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