I Want It to Go to a Good Home

Abstract

Western culture tends to regard animism as a set of beliefs held by groups other than the mainstream majority of the population. However, animism is regularly performed in the actions of many purportedly non-animist individuals and group entities. While large corporations occasionally invoke animism to affect consumer behavior through clever advertising, their strategies are reflective of a an unintentional current of animism in day-to-day life. Non-animist Western adults express animist tendencies that run counter to larger cultural paradigms through everyday speech and action. These people enact a curious concern for inanimate objects in both the way they speak about objects and organize them in their homes. The performance of animist modes of thinking is foregrounded particularly in the language people use to discuss their relationships with objects they need to discard. Because keeping objects over long periods of time can foster important emotional attachments, discarding as an act of material behaviour is often accompanied by both anxiety over waste and concern regarding an object’s fate. The ways in which Westerners approach discarding both reflects and has bearing upon larger cultural trends in human/object relationships.

Written from a folkloristic perspective, this essay explores how unofficially accepted animist behaviours are performed against the backdrop of an officially non-animist culture. It integrates information gathered from personal interviews with scholarship on material culture while drawing on examples of animism expressed in both common advertisements for household commodities and home organization trends. Ultimately, this piece inquires into the anxieties that arise from being in relationship to many things, and considers how embracing the performance of animism on a household level could inform cultural attitudes about the global environment.

Notes

1 In this phenomenon, people find themselves experiencing the belief that objects are sentient in the absence of any framework supporting their belief.