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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Towards Non-human Personhood: Relational Animism and the Moving Image
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Projects & Abstracts
2016-10-01
2021-09-22
2016-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Bogna M. Konior
2016/10/01
Hong Kong Baptist University
2036-461X
26-27
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Towards Non-human Personhood: Relational Animism and the Moving Image
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16455/16777
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Towards Non-human Personhood: Relational Animism and
the Moving Image
Bogna M. Konior / Ph.D. Thesis Project1
Hong Kong Baptist University




   The task of imagining an alternative to modernity and its inherent anthropo-
centrism is an especially pressing matter in an epoch that natural scientists label
‘the Anthropocene’,2 where human relation to the so-called natural environment
on one hand, and technological advancement on the other forms the crux of
critical, artistic, and activist inquiry. Marked by human impact on the seemingly
separate nonhuman realm, the Anthropocene demands new ways of thinking
and acting that critically explore and re-imagine the entanglement of human and
nonhuman actants. Through highlighting the impossibility of asking ethically
relevant questions without considering the nonhuman, the Anthropocene also
invites a re-consideration of the purpose and politics of art. The urgency of this
matter was the starting point of this project, which operates at the intersection
of moving image studies and non-anthropocentric politics from the angle of con-
temporary anthropological theory.
   If, as Bruno Latour3 and fellow anthropologists such as Philippe Descola4 or
Nurit Bird-David5 propose, the ontological assumptions that modernity presup-
poses as axiomatic are only one way of categorizing and experiencing reality
among others, then alternate worldviews, becomings, and existences could by
their very alterity offer a possible solution. In my dissertation, I explore the use-
fulness of engaging with the relational potential of new animism6 in critically
evaluating the separatist ontology of modernity, based upon the binary dualism
of nature and culture. Furthermore, I argue that speculative, aesthetic, affective,
and formal properties of the moving image are indispensible in speculatively


1
  Ph.D. thesis supervised by Professor LO Kwai-Cheung. For information: bognakonior@google-
mail.com
2
  Jan Zalasiewicz and others, ‘Are we now living the Anthropocene?’, GSA Today, 18.2 (February
2008), pp. 4–8.
3
  Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1999).
4
  Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
5
  Nurit Bird-David, ‘Animism revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology’,
Current Anthropology, 40.S1 (February 1999), pp. 67–91.
6
  Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005).

                                      Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                       Bogna M. Konior


imagining animistic futures. Perhaps it is precisely from this periphery that we
can observe the ethos of the Anthropos rising — and falling.
   Yet, what is animism, an ‘ontological anarchy’ or ‘the ghost that hunts moder-
nity’?7 In Beyond Nature and Culture, Descola maps out four ontologies — ani-
mism, naturalism, totemism, and analogism in order to account for the ways in
which humans and nonhumans live the relations between them. Descola syste-
matizes these relations on the basis of enacted similarity and dissimilarity betwe-
en humans and non-humans. Naturalism, based on a strict division of the natural
from the cultural is the ontology of modernity: humans, as the sole possessor of
any interiority (culture) are only by virtue of their material bodies connected to
the non-human world (nature), which itself is devoid of an interior. In this onto-
logy, representation and meaning separate humans from the nonhuman world.
On the contrary, in animism, humans and non-humans share an interiority — the
possibility of becoming persons through engaging in relational practice that cuts
across the nature/culture division.
   In contrast to the loaded terms stereotypically associated with animism, such as
‘spirits’, ‘ghosts’, ‘shamans’, ‘supernatural’ or ‘life forces’, personhood is the least
burdened with the oppressive politics of the nineteenth century anthropology. To
approach animism as practice rather than belief is to vacate the territory of tran-
scendental commitment to a world distant from ours, populated with anthropo-
morphic spirits and vengeful ghosts. Rather than that, animism as practice rooted
in relationality highlights the immanent entanglement of human and nonhuman
actors in the here and now. This, in turn, accentuates the vital role of creative
practices, such as art, philosophy and activism, in laying groundwork for a politics
beyond anthropocentrism — a politics that the Anthropocene pressingly demands.
   Can animism help us think a post-naturalist cinema? According to Descola,
‘[the arts] enjoy a certain degree of freedom, which affords the possibility
of stepping into different ontologies’,8 while for Felix Guattari, animism is
the condition that brings about ‘aesthetic and affective events that [could]
recompose the world’.9 Indeed, cinema theory provides multiple considerations
of the medium’s ability to world-build and fabulate; to viscerally immerse in
new worlds. As film philosopher Patricia Pisters states, referring to the work of
Gilles Deleuze, ‘cinema is not an illusion of reality but a reality of illusions’.10
Among various scholarly approaches, the idea that the cinema is an ontological
vehicle for thought rather than a representation of reality runs throughout the
history of cinema theory; for some it is a matter of formalism and for others a

7
  Anselm Franke, ‘Introduction’, e-flux, 36, (July 2012) <http://www.e-flux.com/journal/introduct
ion%E2%80%94%E2%80%9Canimism%E2%80%9D/> [accessed 6 March 2016].
8
   Eduardo Kohn, ‘A Conversation with Philippe Descola’, Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the
Anthropology of Lowland South America, 7.2, Article 1 (2009).
9
   Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992), p. 86.
10
    Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Filmphilosophy of Digital Screen Culture
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 65.

158
        Towards Non-human Personhood: Relational Animism and the Moving Image


necessary space for political speculation.11 While fleshing out the connections
between relationality and film philosophy would demand a separate dissertation,
I take as especially relevant the instances when film theory explicitly engages
with animism or other non-modern ontologies. From Jean Epstein’s assertion
that all of cinema is animistic12 to Rachel Moore’s Savage Theory: Cinema as
Modern Magic,13 Raul Ruiz’s meditation ‘on a shamanic cinema’14 and, more
recently, Sarah Cooper’s The Soul of Film Theory,15 film theory has stressed the
political potential of non-modern ontologies as enabling an enchantment that
cuts through modernity’s dualistic reductions. Following Moore’s statement that
‘the cinema is for the moderns as magic is to the primitives’,16 it would seem that
all engagement with the cinema is a mode of self-anthropology, an anthropology
of the moderns. Capturing and generating animist stances, the cinema reveals
its position as an ethical and speculative agent, investigating and proposing
remedies to anthropocentric modernity and humanism.
   Inter-disciplinary in its scope, this dissertation seeks to present a possible con-
junction of the ontological turn in contemporary anthropology, from which it
borrows the concept of animism, and moving image studies. While the sizeable
field of visual ethnography continues to produce insight on stylistic and aesthetic
features of ethnographic films — often in relation to realism — little research
has been generated on how fiction or experimental films can touch on ontolo-
gical questions that anthropology currently investigates. Although a number of
anthropological studies deal with the question of perception,17 cinema is rarely
used as a thought model. Through a diffractive reading of anthropological and
cinema theory as well as case study analysis of selected films, this project pro-
poses that an engagement with the moving image through an animist lens can
produce ethical insight into human relations with the nonhuman world.




11
   See, for example: Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006);
Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2015); John Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (New York: New
York University Press, 2003).
12
   Jean Epstein, ‘Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna’, in Jean Epstein. Critical Essays and New
Translations, ed. by Sarah Keller and Jason Paul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012),
pp. 287–307.
13
   Rachel Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
14
   Raul Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema (Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1995), pp. 73–91.
15
   Sarah Cooper, The Soul of Film Theory (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
16
   Moore, p. 12.
17
   See, for example: Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the
Siberian Yukagharis (Oakland: University of California Press, 2007).

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