ed note: as part of a new initiative examining how theory gets made, we are featuring interviews with recent Anthropological Theory authors, inquiring into their writing and thinking process. This interview, with Jeff Kochan about his article “Ingold, hermeneutics, and hylomorphic animism” (2023), is the first of these interviews.

1. Could you say a bit about your own trajectory, and research interests?

My 1998 MPhil thesis was a philosophical critique of theories of tool-use in cognitive anthropology, and it made substantial reference to Tim Ingold’s work from the 1990s. After submitting the thesis, I travelled to Manchester to meet Tim. It was a great visit, and he was very generous to me. I started a PhD in 2000, the same year that Ingold’s Perception of the Environment appeared. In 2002, I gave a paper at the Ninth International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS), in which I critiqued Ingold’s new direction as a form of Platonism. Tim chaired the session in which I gave the paper, and he was again very generous to me.

I was in occasional touch with Tim after that, but my PhD thesis was moving in the direction of Heideggerian philosophy of technology and STS more generally. Meanwhile, I continued to connect with anthropologists, among whom David G. Anderson and Julie Cruikshank have been particularly important. I was somehow becoming a philosopher-groupie on the fringes of circumpolar anthropology.

In a 2015 article, “Objective Styles in Northern Field Science” (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 52), I drew on extant ethnographies of the North to tease out a social style of thinking and doing that facilitates successful collaboration between field scientists and Indigenous partners. I call this style “epistemic neighbourliness.”

In an attempt to put epistemic neighbourliness into practice, my research now involves a historical deconstruction of the European concept of “animism.” My aim is to bring to light the persistent threads of animism that run through the European scientific tradition. By better understanding the role of animism in our own tradition, we might then be in a better position to build bridges to Indigenous ways of understanding and being in nature.

This is my neighbourly response to a cautious suggestion made by Tewa philosopher of science, Gregory Cajete (Santa Clara Pueblo), that animism could serve as a bridging concept between European and Indigenous scientific traditions. [Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Sante Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2000).]

2. What drove you to write this specific article?

 I distinguish between two kinds of European animism: Aristotelian and Platonist. In a 2022 article, “Ingold’s Animism and European Science” (Perspectives on Science 30/4), I reprise my 2002 CHAGS paper by arguing that Ingold’s account of animism tacks to the Platonist tradition. Ingold frames existence as a unitary “total field” animated by a singular Bergsonian élan vital, or “life force.”

The 2023 AT article is a companion to this 2022 article. While in the latter I show that Ingold’s animism is Platonist, in the former I defend Aristotelian animism as providing a better bridge to Indigenous ways of knowing and being in nature.

The AT article cites several ethnographic examples to support this claim, but it is also worth mentioning here an observation by North American Indigenous scholars Marie Battiste (Mi’kmaq) and Sa’ke’j Henderson (Chicksaw) that Aristotelian immanent powers are “similar” to the Algonquin concept of mntu, the “life forces” that Algonquin peoples use to explain observed events in nature. [Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Global Challenge (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 2000).]

Notice that Battiste and Henderson translate mntu in the plural, as “life forces,” while Ingold appeals to a singular “life force.” This distinction between a pluralising and a singularising conception of animate power is a key difference between Aristotelian and Platonist animism.

Of course, Indigenous perspectives are likely to be no less diverse than European ones, so perhaps Platonism will also find its counterpart in Indigenous traditions. But I don’t think Ingold has demonstrated this in any compelling way.

3. In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions the article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

The article is a direct intervention into ongoing transdisciplinary attempts to reconceptualise animism. Ingold has played a decisive role in these efforts, but one might also mention David Abram, Nurit Bird-David, Philippe Descola, and Graham Harvey, among other leading figures.

By delivering a strong defence of Aristotelian animism, I hope to shake up the “new animism,” encouraging more critical reflection on the influence exercised by the European animist tradition on our more general deliberations about animism as a way of being in the world.

4. Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

Post-positivistic philosophers of science refer to the “theory ladenness” of observation. I understand this in hermeneutic terms, as the claim that any attempt to make sense of experience will necessarily draw on background assumptions rooted in past (personal and/or inherited) ways of understanding and being in the world. It is nonsense to think that we can escape the social and historical conditions that inevitably shape us as cognitive beings. By reflecting critically on those conditions, we will be in a better position to shape them even as they continue to shape us.