A haunted world: Animism, spirits and sorcery as the work of art

Abstract

Animist lifeways throughout time and across cultures recognize and celebrate a sympoietic world peopled by many types of beings beyond the human. This world is considered as equally inward as it is material – indeed, ensouled – a thoroughly ‘haunted’ world of interchangeable and entangled spirits and bodies, or what I call the sorcerous quality of such a living cosmos following Deleuze and Guattari. Such a cosmovision, long considered erroneous and ‘primitive’ by the rationalist West, has seen a recent resurgence of interest and reconsideration by so-called western thought in anthropology and elsewhere. However, the presence and reality of spirits and other immaterial forces that animism embraces pose great epistemological problems for the western stance. Specifically, it is troubled by the work of sorcery and by sorcerers themselves, those who participate in the a-logical, dreamlike becomings that blur the boundaries of what is, what is actualized and what is in potentia. In an attempt to navigate this strange dimension of life, this essay will argue that the work of sorcery, as it is understood and practised by animist lifeways, is active and reserved deep within the western ‘tradition’ as the work of art. This will be evidenced in the words and work of artist Robert Smithson as they relate to the poétes maudits of late nineteenth-century Paris, the Lakota heyókȟa, Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism and Tim Ingold’s ‘one world anthropology’.