Revisting Animism in Sociological Theory Trough the Cinema of the Global South

The concept of animism has been revisited in recent decades in anthropology within the framework of the so-called “ontological turn” (Descola 2013, Viveiros de Castro 2014, Holbraad and Pedersen 2017), leaving the colonial framework in which it arose as the primitive belief of the colonized. It is understood more than as a religion as an experiential and lived form of relationship with the environment (Ingold 2000) in which the modern separation between culture and nature do not operates, hence its interest in the era of ecological crisis of the Anthropocene, which is born from the anthropocentric forgetfulness of said relationship (Latour 1993, 2018).

I consider that sociological theory must also open itself to the new concept of animism, to broaden its modern Eurocentric limits, an urgent task in this context of ecological crisis. I have recently incorporated selected independent films of the Global South as a heterodox methodology for visualizing animist ontology for a sociology that I propose to call “ontological.” Specifically, I have investigated as an example the film work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who presents us with the Thai region of Isaan, highly influenced by Laotian animism and shamanism (Malaina 2022). Within the framework of an epistemic model inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of rhizome, I suggest that films such as Tropical Malady (2004) or Uncle Boonmee who can recall his past lives (2010), allow us to sensorially and emotionally explore “other world” of the “pluriverse” (Escobar 2018) with different relations between the human and the non-human. I conceive these examples of fictional cinema as “ethno-cinematographic rhizomes” that could be extended to other independent film productions from the Global South and serve as practical and methodological support to a social theory that opens up to the “ontological turn.”