Indigenous and scientific groups are increasingly keen to collaborate with one another. Yet such collaborations face many obstacles, including conceptual ones. My research focuses on one such obstacle: animism. This is a nineteenth century European concept used to mark Indigenous culture as being more “primitive” than modern scientific culture. Recent scholarship decries this demarcation as colonial, and instead proposes a new, more liberatory, “ontology” of animism.

However, this “new animism” often repeats the old distinction between animism and science, and so may also obstruct collaboration between Indigenous and scientific groups. I propose, instead, to treat the colonial legacy of animism as a problem of temporality rather than of ontology. With this shift to temporality, animism might be reconstructed as a bridge across which Indigenous and scientific groups can meet as equal, but different, partners.

Ein Vortrag im Rahmen des Kolloquiums "Diversity Studies" - hier zum vollständigen Programm