Eat your neighbours

Eat your neighbors by Graham Harvey

"If animism can be seen in rituals addressing living beings who we wish to eat, it is also evident in an attitude to the world as a community rather than a resource. It is not only peculiar activities but also everyday living. As members of an ever expanding family of life, we have no right to take but are invited to share, to participate, to engage and relate. Animist elders slowly teach younger animists about ways of being that negotiate the difficulty of eating neighboring, related beings. They show others how to pay attention, to listen, to know whether permission is given to gain nutrition and pleasure from consuming others. They also indicate what is inappropriate, arrogant or insulting behave towards others. The precise nature of these understandings and actions varies from one animist culture to another. But the common theme is always “respect”. There is another sense in which we eat our neighbors. We’ve become familiar with the notion of a “carbon footprint”: the effect our consumption of fossil fuels has in the world around us. In the context of global climate changes we’ve caused, we need to consider not only our carbon footprints but the results of all our footsteps. Animism has a harder edge than is implicit in the comparison of fuel-use to footprints! We are inescapably part of a world of eating and being eaten. We can only do “violence with impunity” in small scale and local ways, and even here only with considerable care. The massive acts of violence that support modernist consumerist lives have no place in any form of respect for life." www.newstatesman.com/200703010007