Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
In
In this article, I propose that the animism presented by Miyazaki Hayao of Studio Ghibli opens a new perspective on responding to the climate crisis and the Anthropocene. Miyazaki is acknowledged globally for his animation films, most notably
This paper argues that Miyazaki’s films provide stories and images of animism which help us not only to rethink human-nature relationships but also to open up our imagination to envisage a new direction in the paradigm of the social sciences in this age of the Anthropocene. Animism may be defined as a diverse philosophy of nature, which conceives of the spiritual world in nature as the source of universal life; and further, to foreshadow my discussion below of Miyazaki’s understanding of animism, it rests upon the non-dualistic premise of the oneness of life, nature, and spirit/soul (
Although there have been attempts to clarify the theoretical significance of Miyazaki’s work in relation to climate change (Pan, 2020), scholarly exploration of his work from the viewpoint of animism is limited (see Jensen and Blok, 2013; Ogihara-Schuck, 2014; Thomas, 2019; Yoneyama, 2019, 2020). This might be because it is difficult to deal with animism within the existing dominant paradigm of the social sciences, as I explore in detail below. Nevertheless, Miyazaki’s films are enormously popular and have a very wide appeal that transcends cultural and age barriers (Pan, 2020). By presenting animism in a way that attracts millions of people around the world, do Miyazaki’s films provide a response to Ghosh’s crisis of imagination and crisis of culture?
In order to explore this thesis, I address three questions: 1) What are the key features of Miyazaki Hayao’s animism, which I call critical animism in this article? 2) How does his animism differ from ‘classical animism’ and ‘new animism’? 3) What is the theoretical significance of Miyazaki’s animism? By addressing these questions, I argue that there is a potential for Miyazaki’s animism to interrogate and disrupt the fundamental assumptions of modernity and the social sciences, and that this enables us to start envisaging a new direction in the paradigm of the social sciences.
Miyazaki Hayao’s Animism
Animism is the most important tenet of Miyazaki’s signature films, including
Miyazaki’s animism has three key components. The first is his extensive and beautiful depiction of nature endowed with agency (Miyazaki, 2008a: 90; Napier, 2018), which reflects and emphasizes the voices he gives to nature. Perhaps the most illuminative representation of this agency is the
The second key component of Miyazaki’s animism derives from his position in the historical and political context of Japan, especially in relation to Shinto. Shinto is a sophisticated example of animism (Clammer, 2004: 102) where kami represent a spiritual and vitalistic force in nature. In Japan, however, ‘images of nature have played a particularly central role in moulding the imagery of nationhood’ (Morris-Suzuki, 1998: 35), and the concept of animism has been ‘widely used as a way of explaining the distinctiveness of the national culture’ and its putative superiority (Clammer, 2004: 83). As such, the discourse on animism has often had political and ideological implications with strong jingoistic and orientalist colours (see Umehara, 1989, Yasuda, 2006, for instance, and my critique of nationalistic animism in Yoneyama, 2019: 17–28). This aspect of animism in Japan is closely linked to Shinto as a state ideology (the modern institutional aspect of Shinto). Miyazaki’s ‘challenge’ has been how to distance himself from state animism and convey
Miyazaki’s animism instead reflects what UNESCO defines as the often ‘intangible cultural heritage’ that exists in diverse forms of folk belief (UNESCO, n.d.). A critical element distinguishing Shinto as state ideology and Shinto as intangible cultural heritage is the significance of the local and place in the latter. As pointed out by Clammer, animism is ‘intensely local’ (2004: 95), as it is about the direct connection between people and the numinous power of a particular place. The distinction between the two kinds of Shinto is most sharply demonstrated by the Meiji era’s 1906 Imperial Ordinance, which enforced the destruction of small village shrines to configure bigger shrines as the administrative and ideological apparatus of the modern state. Miyazaki clearly disassociates himself from ideological aspects of Shinto. He states that: ‘I don’t go to worship at a shrine at New Year’s. It’s because I can’t believe that the gods are inside those gaudy shrines’ (Miyazaki, 1996: 360). Thus, shrines that appear in his films are local shrines, which are humble and decoration-free, and very much a part of nature, like the one in
The third key component of Miyazaki’s animism is his negation of dualism, or critique of what Val Plumwood calls the ‘hyperseparation’ of Western binaries (cited in Rose, 2013: 94). What is often misunderstood as ‘moral ambiguity’ between ‘good and evil’ by Western viewers schooled in dualism actually stems from Miyazaki’s negation of binaries. Thus, Miyazaki’s depictions of ‘good and evil’ (Napier, 2006) and ‘purity and pollution’ (Wright, 2005) are the result of his deliberate challenge to the dualistic view of the world (see also Reinders, 2016). His negation of binaries is again best articulated by the manga version of
Classic Animism and New Animism
Miyazaki is not alone in presenting a critique of dualism, albeit indirectly through the medium of animation films. The Cartesian human-nature dichotomy has been critiqued especially since the 1990s (e.g. Haraway, 1991; Latour, 1993; Descola and Palsson, 1996), both generally in postmodern scholarship and specifically by ‘new animism’, academic bodies of work that surfaced around the turn of the 21st century, which postulated,
Rethinking the human-nature dichotomy, however, is not easy because human-nature dualism is a ‘western-based cultural formation going back thousands of years’ (Plumwood, 2015: 445). It sees the human as not only entirely separate from but superior to the nonhuman because human essence is thought to be ‘the higher disembodied element of mind, reason, culture and soul or spirit’ (Plumwood, 2015: 445). By positioning humans above the natural world, this human-nature binary justifies using the nonhuman (i.e. nature) as a mere resource for humans. Human-nature dualism is thus coupled with
One scholarly trend that offers a radical critique of the human-nature binary, and anthropocentrism as its corollary, is ‘new animism’. It is called ‘new’ to differentiate it from the classic animism of Edward Tylor, who established animism as an anthropological term in 1871 in
Although the definition of animism has diverged little from the Tylorian definition for more than a century (Bird-David, 1999: S67), the
In other words, Tylor ‘locked up’ animism in Cartesian dualism (as the ‘primitive religion’ of the ‘rude savage’) and analysed it through the prism of modernity. By ‘locking up’ animism in the realm of estranged ‘primitive culture’, he established animism as the antithesis of modernity. This is not surprising because modernity began with the subjugation of ‘superstition’ and ‘magic’ to be replaced with rationality and science. As pointed out by Max Weber (2020 [1918]),
Advocates of new animism challenged this foundational tripod of modernist social sciences, based on the notion that ‘the project of modernity is ill-conceived and dangerously performed’ (Harvey, 2005: xii). In contrast to Tylorian animism, proponents of new animism critique modernity through an animist mirror in which animist epistemology’s alternative ways of knowing and being are deployed to question the premises of social scientific knowledge. Depending on the frame of reference each researcher uses, different interpretations of animism are offered. Thus, animism has been taken to represent relational epistemology (Bird-David, 1999); perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro, 2004); different ontologies of nature (Descola, 1996); or recognition of the ability to sense the vitalistic force that is constantly on the verge of the actual or becoming (Ingold, 2006: 10). Nonetheless, the core stance of new animism seems to be recent scholars’ positive embrace of an epistemology/ontology which envisages overlapping commonalities between human and nonhuman, i.e. to create a positive animism which seeks to disrupt the human:nature dichotomy.
Although new animism has given a positive valence to animistic epistemology and ontology, it has three weaknesses that prevent it from developing into a powerful critical tool to bring about change in modernity. First, new animism is exemplified via the cases of mostly hunter-gatherer indigenous communities often farthest away from modernity, and in this very process, it has (again) enclosed animism in the space that is the antithesis of modernity which, in turn, renders it almost irrelevant in mainstream social science, let alone in everyday life in modern society. Alf Hornborg (2015b) writes: ‘However much we admire the eco-cosmologies of the Nayaka, the Achuar, or the Cree, we should not expect to encounter them anywhere but in the anthropology departments, and definitely not in mainstream textbooks on ecology or sustainability’ (p. 248).
Second, methodologically, new animism still has an element of Eurocentrism, through its ethnographic approach which creates the division between the observer and the observed (Fabian, 2014). The observer (who is normally an Anglophone researcher) converts the local animistic epistemology/ontology into abstract and academic terminologies, concepts and theories which have currency largely within highly specialized academic circles in the West. The voices of the indigenous peoples, or ‘native informants’ (Spivak, 1999), are limited to what is captured as data and presented as quotations, to construct the researcher’s argument or theory. With its frame of reference and research methods, new animism still tends to ‘lock up’ animism as the antithesis of modernity in a dualistic manner. New animism thus does not provide a cultural frame of reference that is strong enough to address Ghosh’s ‘crisis of culture/imagination’ alluded to earlier.
Third, reference to Asia, especially
Critical Animism
‘Critical animism’ emerged 1) from the fusion of intangible cultural heritage and a critique of modernity, and 2) as a legacy of Minamata disease, a large-scale industrial pollution that surfaced in the 1950s and continued to be a major issue that caused immeasurable human, social and ecological devastation (Ui, 1992; George, 2001). Critical animism arose from a conscious embrace of animism built on a knowing critique of the modern. As will be elaborated below, it is a philosophy that ideates nature as the combination of the life-world and the spiritual-world from which all life emerges, with particular emphasis on the significance of locality/place.
More specifically, my notion of critical animism has been derived from the analysis of the life stories of Miyazaki Hayao and three other distinguished intellectuals in Japan, who have a strong association with Minamata.
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I refer to their animism as ‘critical’ because it emanated from people who experienced problematic aspects of modernity, which caused a ‘paradigm shift’ in their own lives: that is, they came to realize that animism is essential for surviving modernity. In other words, an experience of
Their animism also resulted from strong self-reflexivity. In order to explore this self-reflexivity, I adopted a ‘narrative’ approach proposed by Jean-François Lyotard. In The Postmodern Condition (1979) Lyotard maintains that: the narrative exists outside of scientific knowledge, closely related to the ‘knower’ (p. 7), free from the need to legitimate argumentation through proof (p. 27). It can create a new meaning that emerges from the movement against established ways of reasoning, and a new kind of knowledge that illuminates the unknown (p. 60). Although critical animism is a term I coined, it is based on an analysis of animism that Miyazaki and others explore in their own words in the context of their own lives. It is not based on the privilege of a researcher trying to represent and make sense of the world of indigenous people, as pointed out by Descola (2015: 78).
Miyazaki’s animism is based on his self-reflexivity as Japanese, on his struggle to find his own identity while being critical of Japan as a nation-state. His discovery that nature, broadleaf evergreen forests in particular, encompasses part of Japan and neighbouring Asia in a common cultural zone, a way of life based on the forests, enabled Miyazaki to re-establish his identity as someone brought up in Japan not as a state but as part of a broader cultural zone defined by nature. This realization, in turn, enabled him to reconnect to the way nature is perceived at the grassroots in Japan where animistic cosmology remained intact (Miyazaki, 1996: 357–8). 3
Animism is at the core of Miyazaki’s film production. He explains (1996: 110–11) that
Miyazaki’s account of the presence of
Thus, both Miyazaki and the Nayaka pay attention to this independent, external agency, a film-like entity, which tries to convey to the next generation their existence in-the-world. Instead of holding communal events, Miyazaki lets this agency,
Compared with new animist scholarship, theoretically, Miyazaki’s animism presents a deeper critique of 1) human-nature dualism/anthropocentrism, 2) secularism, and 3) Eurocentrism, the ‘tripod’ foundations of modernity. First, as discussed earlier, it is not just the human-nature dichotomy that Miyazaki challenges: he negates dualism itself, which presents a far greater disruption to the modernist social science paradigm. Second, for Miyazaki, the unseen world is not just a spiritual world, it is a life-world which comes with a concrete entity such as
To sum up, Miyazaki Hayao’s animism is an extension of new animism, but it has more potential than new animism to radically destabilize the foundational tripod of the modernist paradigm of social science. His critical animism rejects Anthropocentrism, negates dualism, secularism, and Eurocentrism, and is oriented towards the politics of place in order to counter hierarchical power structures. A memorable contribution of Miyazaki’s animism to the critique of Western hierarchical dualism is an image of an animistic world where the life-world and spiritual-world exist as one vitalistic force. 4 With its tremendous influence beyond academia, this image has the potential to stimulate our imagination in a new direction and construct a different paradigm that is free from the hierarchical dualisms between human and nature, material and spiritual and European and the other.
Meanwhile, the tripod assumptions remain embedded in modernity, and instead of waning, they appear to be getting stronger with the rise of the Anthropocene narrative, a powerful scientism that has become a contemporary meta-narrative (Chernilo, 2017). In the dominant Anthropocene discourse, nature is not deemed to have independent autonomy; it is considered to be something controlled by scientific and technological intervention. Nature is seen as something to be humanized and domesticated, and as such it augments anthropocentrism (Lövbrand et al., 2015). With its strong scientism, the Anthropocene meta-narrative also reinforces the secularism that arose in pursuit of science in opposition to religion during the Enlightenment. Furthermore, critical social scientists are concerned that the scientific Anthropocene discourse undermines the critical work accumulated in the social sciences as it presents humans as a monolithic category vis-a-vis nature, and thus fails to see differences and inequalities within human society (e.g. Lövbrand et al., 2015; Malm and Hornborg, 2014; Simpson, 2020). This is problematic because carbon footprints differ significantly between rich and poor countries and it is not ‘fair to speak of the climate change crisis as a common “human” concern’ (Braidotti, 2013: 88; Chakrabarty, 2009); and the road to the climate crisis has also been paved, historically, on unequal and exploitative social, economic, and political systems such as slavery, colonialism, and imperialism (Malm and Hornborg, 2014; Ghosh, 2016). Presenting a neutralized view of humans without critical and political insights makes the scientism of the Anthropocene narrative a Eurocentric colonial discourse (Simpson, 2020; Ghosh, 2016: 87).
The Anthropocene meta-narrative has direct implications for the direction of social sciences as well. If, as Clive Hamilton et al. (2015: 4) argue, nature/the earth is considered as the physical (e.g. topography, energy cycles), to which social sciences ‘must come back’ from our current
In the search for a new direction for social scientific research, Gisli Palsson et al. (2013) conclude that ‘we must explore how Western thought traditions, hitherto heavily dependent on the dualism of nature and society, can confront their internal limits and intellectual tipping points’ (p. 11). In order to find a new direction of social sciences, it is imperative to open up to a broader set of knowledge traditions and communities (Lövbrand et al., 2015; Simpson, 2015; Ghosh, 2016). What is required is a different cultural frame of reference to stimulate our imagination into an entirely different epistemology and ontology. Otherwise, this exploration of a new paradigm may not get very far. Miyazaki’s massive popularity suggests an intuitive grasping or hunger for his animistic stance in the global audience. Is it possible that his films prepare the global audience (including social scientists) to be more attuned to the animistic epistemology and ontology, in such a way as to redress Ghosh’s crisis of imagination and culture?
Much value may be gained from bringing his critical animism into dialogue with the social sciences to move our exploration of the social scientific paradigm in a new direction. Miyazaki’s animism has the potential to radically rupture the existing paradigm of social sciences and to open new ways for the social sciences to understand and engage with the world. First, this may include not only to ‘speak for nature’ (Lövbrand et al., 2015) but to be more sensitized to
With these possibilities, the challenge for social scientists is to make the critique both verbal and theoretical. This will entail taking animistic nature as