The animist manifesto — the plant as a person

TL;DR

Animism is not a religion. It is a grammar. A way of arranging the sentence so that more-than-human beings stay subjects — not objects. Eduardo Kohn (How Forests Think, 2013) showed that the Amazonian forests think according to a semiotic logic of their own. Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass) refuses the pronoun « it » for plants — she offers « ki » in the singular, « kin » in the plural. David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous) reminds us that before the phonetic alphabet, every form of human writing carried the trace of the more-than-human living world. Bayo Akomolafe asks us to unlearn modernity. Anna Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World) follows the matsutake as a co-actor in the unravelling of the Capitalocene. INFUSE does not celebrate animism — we practise it grammatically. Plant = person. Infusion = encounter. Sourcing = relation. Everything else follows.

The trap of the word « animism »

Edward Tylor, the Victorian anthropologist, coined the term animism in 1871 to name what he took to be the primitive stage of human religious evolution — the attribution of a soul to things. The word still carries that debt. It implies that the peoples who practise such a grammar are somehow behind, caught in a cognitive childhood.

That reading has since been undone. Philippe Descola (Par-delà nature et culture, 2005) showed that animism is not an evolutionary stage but one coherent ontology among four — animism, totemism, analogism, naturalism. Naturalism — the modern Western ontology — is not more true. It is more recent. And it has its own geographic insularity: post-Cartesian Europe, with its colonial reach.

We keep the word animism, for lack of a better one, but redefined: not as a belief in floating souls, but as a grammar that keeps more-than-human beings as subjects within the sentence. Not a religion. Not a mysticism. A discipline of language and of perception.

Eduardo Kohn — how forests think

Eduardo Kohn, an American-Ecuadorian anthropologist, published How Forests Think in 2013 with University of California Press. The book rests on four years of fieldwork among the Runa of Ávila, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and proposes a semiotics beyond the human — grounded in Charles Sanders Peirce.

The thesis: thought is not the exclusive property of human symbolic language. It exists wherever signs — iconic, indexical, symbolic — circulate and produce effects. A forest thinks because it sets signs in motion — pheromones, growth patterns, cross-species alarms, mycorrhizae.

Kohn recounts the moment a Runa dog, sleeping in a clearing, is killed by a jaguar. The Runa know: that night you must sleep on your back, because to sleep face-down makes the human legible to the jaguar as prey. The jaguar reads the sleeping body as a sign. If the belly is turned to the ground, it is prey. If the face is turned to the sky, it is a subject. The distinction plays out in the visual pattern — that is, in a semiosis between species.

Kimmerer — refusing the pronoun « it »

Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, teaches at SUNY College of Environmental Science. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) offers something simple and radical: refusing the English pronoun « it » for plants and animals.

« It » reduces the other to an object, a thing, a resource. In Potawatomi, Kimmerer's language, there is a grammatical distinction between animate and inanimate beings. Plants are animate. So is a stone. A mountain, a river, a gathering cloud. The inanimate is the exception — tools, dead remains, manufactured objects.

For English, Kimmerer offers two new pronouns: « ki » in the singular, « kin » in the plural — from the Potawatomi kin (extended family). To say « ki tomato » rather than « it tomato ». To say « kin trees » rather than « the trees ». A small gesture, a colossal grammatical consequence. If you can no longer call a plant « it », you can no longer treat her as a commodity.

In French the trouble is different: the plant already carries a grammatical gender (la sauge, le pin, la rose). But the trap lies elsewhere — in the industrial passive voice (« are harvested », « were extracted ») that erases the plant's agency. INFUSE corrects this: « the sage offers her leaves », « the pine gives its resin », « the root consents to be drunk ».

David Abram — the skin of the world

David Abram, an American phenomenologist and sleight-of-hand magician by trade, published The Spell of the Sensuous in 1996 with Pantheon. The book makes a dizzying claim: before the invention of the Greek phonetic alphabet (~750 BCE), every form of human writing — hieroglyphic, ideographic, runic — carried the trace of the more-than-human living world. Each sign pointed back to an animal, a plant, an element. The phonetic alphabet, by representing only abstract sounds, severed the bond between the written word and the carnal world.

Abram draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and on years of apprenticeship among Indonesian and Nepalese sorcerers. His proposal: the phenomenology of perception — in which the perceiver and the perceived are interwoven — is, structurally, what animist peoples have always known. Not a mysticism. A bodily lucidity about the very nature of perception.

When you touch a leaf, Abram writes, the leaf touches you back. This reciprocity is not a metaphor. It is a phenomenological fact: perception is always chiasmatic. You see the plant; the plant perceives you (through her chemical receptors, her growth adjustments, her volatile emissions). The world has a skin. Your skin is the inner edge of the world.

Akomolafe — unlearning modernity

Bayo Akomolafe, a Yoruba philosopher born in Nigeria and trained in clinical psychology, now lives in India. His project — The Emergence Network — offers what he calls « slow knowledge »: slowing the modern urgency, unlearning the stance of the expert who fixes.

Akomolafe writes: « The times are urgent — let us slow down. » The line is counter-intuitive, and it holds his whole thesis. The ecological crisis is a crisis of modern speed, of the sovereign subject who decides on behalf of the world. Any solution proposed from that stance reproduces the very problem.

His proposal: compost modernity. Not reject it (itself a modern gesture), not transcend it (itself a modern gesture), but compost it — let it decay under other logics. The Yoruba animism he comes from is not a return to a past — it is a fissure in the present through which other worlds can germinate.

Anna Tsing — the matsutake as co-actor

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, an American anthropologist, published The Mushroom at the End of the World in 2015. The book follows the matsutake — a prized pine mushroom — from the ravaged forests of Oregon to the Japanese markets where it fetches astronomical prices.

The matsutake does not grow in the untouched forest. It grows in the disturbed forest — clear-cuts, degraded land, poor soils. It is a sign that life carries on after collapse. Not in its former shape — in a new, hybrid, multispecies form. Tsing calls this « collaborative survival in capitalist ruins ».

The matsutake is not merely an object of study — it is a co-actor. It steers the lives of Hmong, Mexican, Japanese pickers; it reshapes forest economies; it teaches humans to see ecology otherwise. Tsing names this « contamination as collaboration ». There is no purity left. There are fertile entanglements between species.

The INFUSE grammar — concrete practices

INFUSE animism is not a posture. It is a discipline of language applied to every form of communication. Here are the seven grammatical rules we hold to:

1. Plant = subject, never object. « The sage gives », « the linden welcomes », « the root consents ». Not « the sage is used », « the linden is harvested ».

2. Verbs of encounter, not of possession. « To receive an infusion », « to be visited by the chamomile », « to meet the sandalwood ». Not « to take », « to consume », « to use ».

3. Sourcing named. Always name: the source-people, the century, the ritual context, the one who carried it forward. Not « the natives », « the tradition », « since time immemorial ».

4. Refusal of the marketing plural. « The chamomile » as a person — not « our chamomiles » as stock. The singular keeps the singularity intact.

5. Grammatical gender honoured. La sauge is feminine. Le pin is masculine. It is not neutral — it orients the relation.

6. No prescriptive medical claim. The plant offers. The plant proposes. She does not « cure » — she accompanies. See LANGAGE-FILTRE-MASTER for the precise list.

7. Multilingual citations. Keep the original tongue — English, Spanish, Latin, Yoruba — then translate, then set the context. Translation erases; the original bears witness.

FAQ — real questions

Gems & legends

1. The word « animal » and the word « anima » (soul, in Latin) share the same root. In the seventeenth century, Descartes broke that bond: the animal became a machine, the anima became the exclusive property of the human. Modern animism reweaves the etymological link.

2. In 2017 New Zealand recognised the Whanganui River as a legal person — it can now stand in court. An animist decision inside a positive-law system. The precedent has inspired other countries: India did the same for the Ganges and the Yamuna.

3. The French word « personne » comes from the Latin persona — a theatre mask. The person, etymologically, is that through which something speaks. A plant can be persona — something speaks through her. Not anthropomorphism — etymology honoured.

4. Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches environmental students at SUNY College; every semester she sets them an exercise: « For one week, never say it about a plant. Say she, he, ki. See what changes. » Her students report back: « Everything changed. »

5. Eduardo Kohn hesitated for four years before publishing How Forests Think — he feared the anthropological community would tear it apart. The book won the 2014 Bateson Prize and is now translated into eight languages. The anthropological sky tilted.

6. Bayo Akomolafe refuses to give keynotes in English whenever he can — he speaks in Yoruba and has it translated live. The gesture is a reminder that academic English is one language among many, not the universal tongue of thought.

7. Once a year Anna Tsing convenes the Matsutake Worlds Research Group — anthropologists, mycologists, pickers, Japanese economists. Not to produce a book. To think collectively, like fungi. No one is in charge.

8. Akomolafe's line « The times are urgent; let us slow down » has become a meme of the academic decolonisation movement. It is printed on t-shirts, quoted to open conferences, tattooed. Its virality reveals a worldwide fatigue with the urgent modern stance.

Principal sources

1. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press, 2013.

2. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

3. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Pantheon, 1996.

4. Akomolafe, Bayo. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home. North Atlantic Books, 2017.

5. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.

6. Descola, Philippe. Par-delà nature et culture. Gallimard, 2005.

7. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics. Univocal, 2014.

8. Latour, Bruno. Face à Gaïa. La Découverte, 2015.

9. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

10. Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture. John Murray, 1871.

11. Bird-David, Nurit. Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology. Current Anthropology, 1999.

12. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. Routledge, 2000.

Secondary sources

13. Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. SUNY Press, 2011.

14. Mancuso, Stefano & Viola, Alessandra. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Island Press, 2015.

15. Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees. Greystone Books, 2016.

16. Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree. Knopf, 2021.

17. Whyte, Kyle Powys. Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures. English Language Notes, 2017.

18. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.